Amazon has brought out a new cloud service called Glacier to freeze out the competition.
It wants companies to archive and back up their data, all the stuff they have to hang on to for years and years to comply with all the rules, but don’t have to access very often.
Storing all this pack rat data is expensive. Amazon is offering to do it for a penny a gigabyte a month, a “significant savings” it figures is “disruptive.”
As is typical with Amazon there’s no up-front fee and it’s pay-as-you-go. Archives are apparently saved in “vaults” in Amazon’s data center in Virginia via a Glacier API although the FAQ says the “service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.”