Amazon Glacier: Archival Storage for One Penny Per GB Per Month by Jeff Barr.
From the post:
I’m going to bet that you (or your organization) spend a lot of time and a lot of money archiving mission-critical data. No matter whether you’re currently using disk, optical media or tape-based storage, it’s probably a more complicated and expensive process than you’d like which has you spending time maintaining hardware, planning capacity, negotiating with vendors and managing facilities.
True?
If so, then you are going to find our newest service, Amazon Glacier, very interesting. With Glacier, you can store any amount of data with high durability at a cost that will allow you to get rid of your tape libraries and robots and all the operational complexity and overhead that have been part and parcel of data archiving for decades.
Glacier provides – at a cost as low as $0.01 (one US penny, one one-hundredth of a dollar) per Gigabyte, per month – extremely low cost archive storage. You can store a little bit, or you can store a lot (Terabytes, Petabytes, and beyond). There’s no upfront fee and you pay only for the storage that you use. You don’t have to worry about capacity planning and you will never run out of storage space. Glacier removes the problems associated with under or over-provisioning archival storage, maintaining geographically distinct facilities and verifying hardware or data integrity, irrespective of the length of your retention periods.
With the caveat that you don’t have immediate access to your data (it is called “Glacier” for a reason), but it is still an impressive price.
Unless you are monitoring nuclear missile launch signatures or are a day trader, do you really need arbitrary and random access to all your data?
Or is that a requirement because you read some other department or agency was getting “real time” big data?