Last month Amazon announced a new low-cost addition to their AWS cloud service platform called Glacier. Amazon Glacier is designed and priced to address the increasing global need for the archival storage of “cold data” (important data that is infrequently accessed). This makes Glacier the ideal offsite replication destination for your MagnaStor volumes.
MagnaStor Is Tailored For Cold Data
Currently MagnaStor actively protects and heals your cold data on-site and allows offsite replication to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. Soon MagnaStor users will be able to leverage Amazon Glacier as a replication option, allowing them to easily replicate and restore volumes at an even lower continuing cost than S3.
Infrequent Access Means Very Low Cost
With Glacier, cloud storage costs plummet to $0.01/GB with the caveat that requests for data take 3-5 hours to satisfy (not a significant issue for cold data). The cost to request data from Glacier is free for the first 5% of your average monthly volume, with a transfer fee starting at $0.120 after the first GB, which is free. This low storage cost, combined with Amazon’s track record for excelling at the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well, provides MagnaStor users with an attractive offsite replication destination.
MagnaStor’s current plan is to roll out Glacier support to users in October 2012.