Amazon Introduces Glacier: Store Your Data For Only One Penny

Amazon hopes to encourage customers to purchase their Glaciers storage service for simply one penny per gigabyte.

The online retailer boasts that its service differs from most cloud storage - users pay nothing upfront and can scale usage up or down as needed, according to AWS. Service highlights include low cost, secure transfers, and archive durability.

The new service archives customers' data, which is personally organized into vaults, then controlled through Amazon's Identity and Access Management service.

"Amazon Glacier removes the need for complex and time-consuming capacity planning, ongoing negotiations with multiple hardware and software vendors, specialized training, and maintenance of offsite facilities or transportation of storage media to third party offsite locations," Amazon said on its site.

The new service will soon allow use in conjunction with other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which will offers users the ability to seamlessly move data between S3 and Glacier.

While S3 is a good option for someone looking to frequently access their stored data, Glacier is a better pick for those who do not need to access the data very frequently.

Glacier supports various uses, including the archiving of offsite enterprise information, media assets, and research and scientific data, as well as digital preservation, and magnetic tape replacement, according to the AWS site.

Amazon's Glacier is currently available in regions of the U.S. (Northern Virginia, Northern California, Oregon), as well as Ireland and Japan.

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