Amazon Web Services announced it had added its ultra low-cost archival storage service Glacier to its Australian data centre in Sydney. Glacier, launched in the US last year, undercut professionally managed, off-site archiving services at 1c per gigabyte. The Sydney service cost slightly more at 1.2c/GB, nearly one-fifteenth the price of Amazon’s S3 storage service.
Files stored on Glacier were secured with 256-bit encryption and held on redundant storage devices with one of the highest guarantees of reliability in the industry (average annual durability of 99.999999999 percent).
“Amazon Glacier is a secure, reliable and extremely low cost storage service designed for data archiving and backup in the cloud,” Amazon said in a press release. “It addresses challenges that organisations commonly face with traditional, on-premise data centres, including over-paying for data archiving capacity that sits under-utilised, yet is resource-intensive and costly to maintain.”
The addition of the Glacier service to the Australian data centre would partly address concerns about where data was stored, which in some industries was tightly regulated.
Several backup applications could already store data on Glacier. These included Windows desktop app CloudBerry, Mac destkop app Arq and cloud backup service Zoolz.
An app called Icebox could archive files to Glacier from a Dropbox account to free up more storage in Dropbox.
Amazon had added 4,000 Australian and New Zealand customers since its launch in November, up from 10,000. Amazon also added its data warehousing solution Redshift to the Sydney data centre.