Amazon Glacier offers low cost and secure archive storage
Using the operational simplicity of the AWS cloud
Amazon Web Services, a division of amazon.com, has released Amazon Glacier, a secure and low-cost storage solution for data archiving and backup.
The firm says Amazon Glacier is for data that is infrequently accessed, yet needs to be retained for future reference, such as raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance.
Amazon Glacier allows the storage of large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01/GB/month, which the firm says is a significant saving compared with on-premises solutions.
With Amazon Glacier, there are no upfront capital commitments, all ongoing operational expenses are included, and usage can be scaled up or down when needed.
Complete Genomics, a US firm that provides human genome sequencing and analysis as a service to academic and biopharmaceutical researchers, says it has opted for Amazon Glacier.
‘Every day our genome sequencers produce terabytes of data,’ said Keith Raffel, Complete’s senior vice president and chief commercial officer.
‘As our company moves into the clinical space, we face a legal requirement to archive patient data for years that would drastically raise the cost of storage. Thanks to Amazon Glacier’s secure and scalable solution, we will be able to provide cost-effective, long-term storage and thereby eliminate a barrier to providing whole genome sequencing for medical treatment of cancer and other genetic diseases.’
Amazon Glacier allows customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, removing the need for hardware provisioning, data replication across multiple facilities, or hardware failure detection and repair. The service automatically replicates all data across multiple facilities and performs ongoing data integrity checks, using redundant data to perform automatic repairs if hardware failure or data corruption is discovered.
Alyssa Henry, vice president of AWS Storage Services, said: ‘Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well.’