Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Wants To Replace Tape With Slow But Cheap Off-Site "Glacier" Storage
Nerval's Lobster writes with a piece at SlashCloud that says "Amazon is expanding its reach into the low-cost, high-durability archival storage market with the newly announced Glacier. While Glacier allows companies to transfer their data-archiving duties to the cloud — a potentially money-saving boon for many a budget-squeezed organization—the service comes with some caveats. Its cost structure and slow speed of data retrieval make it best suited for data that needs to be accessed infrequently, such as years-old legal records and research data. If that sounds quite a bit like Amazon Simple Storage Service, otherwise known as Amazon S3, you'd be correct. Both Amazon S3 and Glacier have been designed to store and retrieve data from anywhere with a Web connection. However, Amazon S3 — 'designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers,' according to the company — is meant for rapid data retrieval; contrast that with a Glacier data-retrieval request (referred to as a 'job'), where it can take between 3 and 5 hours before it's ready for downloading."
my company pays for offsite storage of our tapes and i did some quick math
$2000 a month to store over 1000 tapes for us. I think the minimum bill is like $1500 if you only have a few tapes
$.01/GB is $10 to $20 per LTO-4 tape per month. i know the specs are less but ive seen LTO-4 tapes hold close to 4GB of data.
i send out one tape per month for storage and keep a bunch more locally. so even on the cheap end that's $240 per month for the first year.
Walkabout the glacier
With stubble on the face. You're
Returning to a place sure
To need a smoother face, pure.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Amazon is smoking crack.
Based on the waiting times, it sounds almost like they have some sort of robotic tape loading system, and you're basically just offloading your tape storage from the office to the nebulous cloud.
Do you have to submit a properly-formatted JCL card to get your data back?
I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing I could do. - Paul Pavel
Where should I put sensitive documents that must be safely stored for a long time? In the cloud, of course!
Rethinking email
WTF is a "web connection"? No, really. Nerds are pedants for a reason, and it isn't just the social awkwardness that predicates against second-guessing what some fuzzy-brained journo or marketeering bod might have been thinking. Terms of art are terms of art. If you're hashing them into buzzword stew, you're talking crap. Please fix, and come back when you don't merely really understand what you're writing about, but know which terms of art to apply just when.
Have gnu, will travel.
I looked at doing my own backups using S3... it's about $25 a month for 200 Gbytes. Gee, that'd be $2 a month (!) in Glacier... but for backups that I just want securely off-site, a five hour wait to get it to S3 is fine.
It's definitely a big cost savings compared to Amazon S3 (i.e. roughly 90% less expensive). For backups that one doesn't need to access in a time-critical manner, it seems like an excellent alternative to S3 (e.g. videos, photos, etc.).
Is the topic? That's pathetic even for you free software hippies.
C'mon can't we talk about taking over Wall St. Banks or something?
If transferring the gigabytes of data nightly over the internet was feasible, we'd be using rsync to an offsite server for a fraction of the cost. Bandwidth / sync time is the issue here, not whether or not its on tape or not. Why would I use Amazon if I can just run rsync to my remote server for (probably) a much lower cost. We use tape because there is not enough time to run these backups over the web. Maybe as some kind of secondary backup solution so Joe doesn't have to go get the tapes, but it probably wouldn't be a nightly solution. At least not for us.
neorush
Back when data may be on numerous tape or magneto optical disks. Glad Amazon has reinvented the 90's.
I look forward to see what services are built on top of this. Easy and cheap backup?
A robotic tape system would generally give you your data back in a few minutes at most, but Amazon is saying you can expect multiple hours of waiting. I'm assuming this system is literally based on people moving around boxes of tapes and inserting them into tape readers; inconvenient but reassuring in its own way. Perhaps they've managed to automate things even further, say by setting up carts of hundreds of tapes carried around by a forklift that get plugged into the robotic tape loading system.
Also sound like an interesting operations challenge though in trying to co-ordinate all the read request jobs when your customers can store as little as 1 byte. You can see why they penalize any attempt to actually read your data, especially if you send in a read request job within a short time period of storing the data.
It usually takes us a couple days to put in the request, get the tapes from offsite, then restore the data, hoping we picked the right dates.
will system meltdowns on Glacier be referred to as Jökulhlaup?
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
This sounds amazingly like someone put money into a data storage system that turned out to be far slower than they'd wanted. Now marketing is picking up the slack by calling it Glacier.
In other words, they're stuck trying to sell white salmon by claiming "Guaranteed to never turn pink in the can!"
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide long term archival tools for end users. This firm would spend its energy focused on front end tools for the end user and make use of Amazon's back end long term storage for the actual infrastructure.
There are many amateur and even professional photographers, for example, with almost no alternatives for very long term storage. Home writable media is nearly all flawed in terms of true long term storage. I'm sure there are many use cases in this space.
In terms of mid-size and larger companies, I think a critical feature will need to be a simple interface that encrypts at the client side prior to sending the data using a private key only available on the client side. I cannot think a responsible I.T. professional would store company critical or customer data on a third party site like that without such protections in place.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Apparently someone at Amazon didn't watch the long term weather forecast - climate change means all the glaciers will be gone in a few decades.
What's really amazing and [un]special about you, is that you are The One case! You are the same as everyone, so no one needs things that you don't need, everyone has the same constraints (and lack of constraints) that you do, and your desires represent the desires of humanity.
Congratulations on being 100% of the market.
I have been looking for you, though previously dismissed you as mythical. So tell me: what is the next great product that everyone wants? You, of all people, know the answer to this.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide [...] tools for end users.
You hit the nail on the head about AWS' goal: They are providing the APIs for others to develop consumer-level tools and products by utilizing their existing infrastructure. Everything, from EC2 to S3 to R53, is geared towards developers (which will then market to end users) by providing full functionality via an API. Glacier is no exception, and as you said, there will be great tools available for end users for those ready to create them.
Maybe someone reading this thread is already fast at work developing exactly what you say.
This is essentially what Amazon (and Google mail/docs for that matter) is doing - Aiming to become your company's new IT department. No CEO in their right mind is going to pay multiple salaries/benefits for a staffed IT department when they can get it from Google and Amazon way cheaper. Even if they pay $10k/month, that's cheaper than paying to staff a 4 person IT departement.
And before you start in about how this helps small startups who can't afford and IT staff, well think again. They can't afford the cloud services either or they wouldn't have the development team running the website/DNS/etc.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
They obviously could use some help.
It's $10/month per 1TB which imho is pretty fair. Maybe not doable if you have 1,000 1TB tapes like someone else posted but for most other businesses that's not bad.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Or is this going to be using tape to store data?
I've been waiting for something like this in my case. As a startup, it lets us get rid of all the servers we keep in the corner because we may "one day need that data on those old hard drives". This was the promise that nimbus.io gave us, but they are about 12 months behind and a dollar short. Sure, this is much slower retrieval, but the likelihood of us ever requesting a retrieval is quite minimal. It's at a cost of $10/TB, and I'm sure we pay more than that now in storage costs.
Where are all the good end-user tools for S3 now?
You can find one or two, but it's curious that a Google search for "Amazon S3 client comparison" turns up links from 2009 and 2010.
More curious is the fact that Dropbox, SugarSync, the MS solution, Google's new solution etc seem to be thriving and providing exactly the kind of services that you'd expect third party S3 clients to provide.
I'm not saying these clients don't exist, but I don't seem to find them very easily compared to other cloud storage options, and you'd kind of expect people to come up with lots of crazy storage solutions.
Considering that glaciers are melting at an alarming rate around the world and losing their 'data' I think 'glacier' might not be the best term for this product. It doesn't really inspire confidence.
The examples all use the Retrieval pricing:
http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/
Not having ever used AWS, I'm wondering what is the difference between a "Transfer Out" and a "Retrieval"?
Okay, I thought Google Play was a terrible name, but Amazon Glacier leaves me speechless.
Kriston
for faster access, you know. http://downloadinternet.funnypart.com/
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Wrong. Now GTFO my lawn.
An internet connection, yes. But a web connection? :)
Well I would have got first post if I wasn't using Amazon Glacier for my swap file.
Does anyone here regularly deal with actually retrieving data stored long term on tape? In theory, it seems sound. I don't do it regularly, but the few times I have had to request a retrieval of old data from tape it's been a complete waste of time. Lots of excuses. No data.
Dropbox and SugarSync both are applications using Amazon S3 for infrastructure (SugarSync says they use "two carrier-grade data centers, including Amazon's S3 facility.") So you've largely answered your own question about where the end-user tools for S3 are.
Actually, as you've just demonstrated, they are quite easy to find and widely used, but the popular ones have made the use of S3 largely invisible to the end user that isn't reading the service provider's infrastructure descriptions.
You mean "Web Scale" is a term that people ACTUALLY use? I thought that that youtube video was just exaggerating for theatrical effect.
*face palm*
This sounds like an ideal medium for PACS - medical imaging. PACS generates large quantities of data, which may be required to be retained for a very long time to be available for medico-legal reasons. For clinical purposes, 97% of the data over three years old is never referenced, but trying to get anyone to agree to an ILM policy that isn't at least 30 years is a real problem. Given the average acute hospital is generating 20TB of image data per year, this service from Amazon might be quite popular. DICOM copes very well with offline data that takes many hours to retrieve - and medico-legal requests can take days to honour, so this could be very successful. The only outstanding requirement is that for EU citizens, the archive would need to be located in the European Economic Area ...
I'm an ordinary home user who wants to backup my really important data in case of catastrophe. Besides lots of little stuff, by far my biggest data in this category is my pictures, and when all totaled up, it comes out to about 75GB.
I've been mulling investing in a service like Crashplan, which according to their pricing would cost me $5 a month if I was month to month, or about $3 a month if I committed to 4 years (!).
Amazon Glacier could offer me backups for one cent a GB per month. So for my scenario, that'd come out to 75 cents a month.
Is it just me or is this an insanely good deal for my consumer scenario?
Use DRBD Proxy:
http://www.linbit.com/products-services/drbd-proxy/
Yes, it's a shameless plug; I work for the company, but for this specific purpose it's a unique and great tool and it gives you a lot more flexibility than using a commercial provider.
I can get behind the idea of having off site stored archives for the unlikely event of on-site and stored media being destroyed. A backup to my backup. Just what I need !!