AWS Announces General Availability of the Lowest Cost Storage in the Cloud: Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, a new storage class that provides secure, durable object storage for long-term retention of data that is rarely accessed. At just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices significantly lower than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data off-site.

To get started with S3 Glacier Deep Archive visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/.

Organizations in many market segments (e.g., financial services, healthcare, and government, etc.) are required to retain data for long periods of time to meet regulatory compliance requirements. In addition, there are organizations, such as media and entertainment companies, that want to keep a backup copy of core intellectual property. These datasets are often very large, consisting of multiple petabytes, and yet typically only a small percentage of this data is ever accessed—once or twice a year at most. To retain data long-term, many organizations turn to on-premises magnetic tape libraries or offsite tape archival services. However, maintaining this tape infrastructure is difficult and time-consuming; tapes degrade if not properly stored and require multiple copies, frequent validation, and periodic refreshes to maintain data durability.

Additionally, it is difficult or impossible to do machine learning and other types of analysis directly on data stored on tape. Now, with S3 Glacier Deep Archive, customers with large datasets they want to retain for long periods will be able to eliminate both the cost and management of tape infrastructure, while ensuring that their data is preserved for future use and analysis, such as in oil and gas seismic exploration and developing autonomous vehicles. Customers can still use S3 Glacier when they want retrieval options in minutes for archive data, while S3 Glacier Deep Archive is ideal for customers who want the lowest cost for archive data that is rarely accessed. In the event that recovery becomes necessary, the objects can be recovered in as little as 12 hours with S3 Glacier Deep Archive versus days or weeks with off-site tape.

“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,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Amazon S3, AWS. “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.”

With six different storage class options, Amazon S3 provides the broadest array of cost-optimization options available in the cloud today. All objects stored in S3 Glacier Deep Archive are replicated and stored across at least three geographically-dispersed Availability Zones, designed for 99.999999999% (eleven nines) durability, and can be restored within 12 hours or less. S3 Glacier Deep Archive also offers a bulk retrieval option that lets customers retrieve petabytes of data within 48 hours. Customers can upload data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive over the internet or using AWS Direct Connect and the AWS Management Console, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS DataSync, AWS Command Line Interface, or the AWS Software Development Kit. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is integrated with Tape Gateway, a cloud-based virtual tape library feature of AWS Storage Gateway, so customers using it to manage on-premises tape-based backups can choose to archive their new virtual tapes in either S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Deluxe is the world's leading video creation to distribution company offering global, end-to-end services and technology. Through unmatched scale, technology and capabilities, Deluxe enables the global market for video content. “As the demand for higher quality and increased amounts of content continues to rapidly grow, we will now have the ability to eliminate the limitations of a hybrid on-prem tape model by using S3 Glacier Deep Archive to reduce access time and rapidly shift the availability and workability of content sources exclusively on the cloud," said Andy Shenkler, Chief Product Officer, Deluxe. "AWS's S3 Glacier Deep Archive addresses the challenges that have previously existed around the economics and timelines associated with accessing and utilizing large media assets throughout every step of the content creation and distribution process."

Vodacom is a leading communications company providing a wide range of services, including mobile and fixed voice, messaging, data, financial, Enterprise IT, and converged services to over 73 million customers across the African continent. “We are a data-driven organization and use current and historical information to provide personalized customer offers, improve user retention, and ensure a higher quality of network service through analysis,” said Willie Stegmann, Group Chief Information Officer, at Vodacom. “We identified archive and backup storage as key candidates to migrate offsite in an attempt to reduce the time we spend managing storage infrastructure. S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides us with near limitless secure and durable capacity at a cost so low that we no longer need to consider deleting critical data. The use of S3 Glacier Deep Archive also means that we can easily meet recovery time objectives of 12 to 48 hours for the identified backup and archive storage sets.”

The Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a consortium of higher education institutions committed to providing both a preservation repository for digital content and collaboratively developed services related to that content. APTrust helps address one of the great challenges facing research libraries and their parent institutions—preventing the permanent loss of scholarship and cultural records. "We accept all types of digital content from member institutions—print, audio, video, encrypted, and other types of files,” said Chip German, Program Director, APTrust. “Our members deposit with us all sorts of data they consider valuable, including data that's required by funders to be preserved and made accessible for a set period. The copies we store are usually secondary ones in case, a disaster damages the primary copy, but that level of assurance comes at a cost that researchers and their institutions often haven't fully anticipated. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive gives APTrust members a much more affordable option to preserve their data for as long as they desire, and to do so confidently and conveniently."

Commvault, an AWS Partner Network member, is a recognized global enterprise software leader in the management of data for cloud and on-premises environments. “Our customers need to be able to move, manage, and use data in a way that promotes business agility and contains costs,” said Karen Falcone, Vice President, Worldwide Cloud and Service Providers, at Commvault. “With Commvault’s support for AWS, customers get single, comprehensive data management platform with full data protection, backup, recovery, management, and eDiscovery capabilities—all tightly integrated with AWS services. And now, S3 Glacier Deep Archive will allow us to provide the lowest cost storage available in the cloud and have it accessible, if necessary, in the future. For our customers in regulated industries, that can mean petabytes of data going back years. Customers can use S3 Glacier Deep Archive today as an Early Release feature.”

Veritas is an AWS Partner Network Advanced Storage competency partner and the proven industry leader in data protection and software defined storage solutions for over two decades. “Our customers need to be able to harness the power of their information with solutions designed to serve the world’s most complex and largest heterogeneous environments while accelerating digital transformation, reducing risk, and delivering cost savings,” said Cameron Bahar, SVP & CTO, at Veritas. “With Veritas solutions supporting AWS, we continue to extend our support for cloud usage models and provide our customers simple and agile solutions to solve complex data management issues for backup/recovery, archiving primary storage, and disaster recovery use cases. With Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Veritas will be able to help customers increase their savings even more significantly. Veritas customers can use S3 Glacier Deep Archive Standard tier with the latest NetBackup version as of today.”