Overview: Amazon Glacier
Amazon Glacier
Is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.
Service Highlights
Low cost – Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. With Amazon Glacier, there are no upfront capital commitments and all ongoing operational expenses are included in the price. You save money by paying only for what you use.
Secure – Amazon Glacier supports secure transfer of your data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys. You can also control access to your data using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM enables organizations with multiple employees to create and manage multiple users under a single AWS account and to set resource-based access policies.
Durable – Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive. The service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. To increase durability, Amazon Glacier synchronously stores your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives. Unlike traditional systems which can require laborious data verification and manual repair, Glacier performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.
Flexible – Amazon Glacier scales to meet your growing and often unpredictable storage requirements. There is no limit to the amount of data you can store in the service. Whether you’re storing petabytes or gigabytes, Glacier automatically scales your storage up or down as needed. In addition, you can choose to store your data in the Amazon Glacier Region that meets your regulatory, throughput, and geographic redundancy criteria.
Simple – Amazon Glacier allows you to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, and makes retaining data for long periods, whether measured in years or decades, especially simple. Amazon Glacier removes the need for complex and time-consuming capacity planning, ongoing negotiations with multiple hardware and software vendors, specialized training, and maintenance of offsite facilities or transportation of storage media to third party offsite locations. Traditional storage hardware is only supported for a limited number of years. With Amazon Glacier, customers no longer need to manage the expensive, time-consuming, and risky hardware and storage media migrations that are inevitable when your data retention period exceeds the lifetime of your storage hardware. Data uploaded to Amazon Glacier remains safely stored for as long as it is needed with no additional effort from customers.
Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – You can also use AWS Import/Export to accelerate moving large amounts of data into Amazon Glacier using portable storage devices for transport. In the coming months, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) plans to introduce an option that will allow you to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using data lifecycle policies.
