Tue. Mar 19th, 2024

Amazon Web Services has announced its Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive and is available at about $1/TB/month, the lowest data storage cost in the cloud. This is significantly cheaper than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data off-site and data retrieval also is faster from an on-site tape.

Amazon says GDA is suitable for data that is accessed once or twice a year with either 122 or 48-hour latencies to the first byte.

The Restore (Retrieval) request, affected by an API call through the S3 management console, makes a temporary copy of the data, leaving the GDA-held data intact. The thawed out GDA data is not streamed directly to you on-premises or inside AWS for use as it comes in. You have to wait for the copy to be made.

The copy is accessed through an S3 GET request and you can set a limit for the retention of this temporary copy.

GDA data upload is done through an S3 PUT request or via the AWS management console, or AWS Direct Connect, Storage Gateway, Command Line Interface or SDK.

S3 storage classes

AWS offers the following storage classes:

  • Simple Storage Service (S3) Standard
  • S3 Intelligent Tiering
  • S3 Standard Infrequent Access (IA)
  • S3 One Zone IA
  • S3 Glacier for archive
  • S3 Glacier Deep Archive

“We have customers who have exabytes of storage locked away on tape, who are stuck managing tape infrastructure for the rare event of data retrieval. It’s hard to do and that data is not close to the rest of their data if they want to do analytics and machine learning on it. S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just a dollar per terabyte per month and opens up rarely accessed storage for analysis whenever the business needs it, without having to deal with the infrastructure or logistics of tape access,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Amazon S3, AWS.

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