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AWS Reduces Cost of Storing Infrequently Accessed Data
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced it was adding a new option to store infrequently accessed data at a lower cost on Amazon Simple Storage (S3) instances.
"The team found that many AWS customers store backups or log files that are almost never read," spokesman Jeff Barr wrote yesterday. "Others upload shared documents or raw data for immediate analysis. These files generally see frequent activity right after upload, with a significant drop-off as they age. In most cases, this data is still very important, so durability is a requirement. Although this storage model is characterized by infrequent access, customers still need quick access to their files, so retrieval performance remains as critical as ever."
The new storage class for infrequently accessed data is called Infrequent Access (Standard - IA), starting at $0.0125 per gigabyte per month, with a $0.01 per gigabyte charge for retrieval.
"We believe that this pricing model will make this new storage class very economical for long-term storage, backups, and disaster recovery, while still allowing you to quickly retrieve older data if necessary," Barr said.
The company also announced a price reduction for Glacier storage, defined as "a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving and long-term backup," from $0.01 per gigabyte per month to $0.007 per gigabyte per month.
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David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.