If you have a lot of data that you rarely need to access, Amazon wants to put it on ice for you with its new, ultra-cheap Glacier cloud storage solution. The service has been designed by Amazon Web Services for companies — or data-hoarding individuals — who have a lot to stow away for the long haul.
The main advantages of Glacier are its low prices starting at just $US0.01 per gigabyte per month and no more dealing with tapes or hard drives. The drawback is, ahem, glacial transfer speeds. According to the company, “Amazon Glacier is optimised for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable.” So we’re talking about financial documents that need to be archived and not all the ripped movies you’d like to be able to access at the drop of a hat. Between this and Facebook’s arctic server farm, it looks like companies are banking hard on our trust in penguins. [Amazon Web Services via TechCrunch]
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