Amazon rolls out cold cloud storage option
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Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) IA is an alternative to the company’s standard S3 offering and its Glacier service. Amazon’s three storage offerings now include: S3 for fast access to data; S3 IA, which is less expensive than S3 with a slight tradeoff in availability; and Glacier, which offers even less expensive prices, with high availability but the tradeoff of long latency for retrievals.
AWS says customers can migrate data from one service to another based on how frequently they need to access the data. S3 starts at $0.03/GB/month while IA starts at $0.0125/GB/month with 99% availability, and Glacier starts at $0.007/GB/month. When announcing IA, AWS also dropped the price of Glacier from $0.01 to $0.007 GB/month.
AWS also has a series of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) services meant to provide persistent block-level storage for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines.
The introduction of S3 IA could be in response to Google announcing its own new storage service meant for archiving data named Nearline earlier this year. Nearline starts at $0.01 per GB/month.
The moves represent public IaaS cloud vendors continuing to innovate their platforms, compete on services against their top competitors, and giving customers more reason than ever to not store their data on-premises. Read more about the announcement in the AWS blog post.