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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 $240 per month for the first year.
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With stubble on the face. You're
Returning to a place sure
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what about 5 year old billing records for a customer/partner inquiry or lawsuit. i've had to compile those and a 2 week wait was OK in almost every case
I believe this is intended for archival data that is unlikely to be needed, especially not in full, not operational data that you might need to do a full restore from. The kind of data that, in the past, you might file into a tape archive stored in a basement somewhere, "just in case" it was ever needed.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Do you have to submit a properly-formatted JCL card to get your data back?
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Where should I put sensitive documents that must be safely stored for a long time? In the cloud, of course!
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Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Amazon is smoking crack.
You seem to be confusing backups necessary for day-to-day business continuity with archival records storage typically not required for day-to-day business continuity. If the data stored on Glacier can be encrypted and the encryption/decryption keys under the control of the client and not accessible under any circumstances to Amazon, then Glacier might be a viable option for organizations. Regulatory compliance in many fields / industries could potentially rule out the use of such a service as Glacier. Although for the typical home user or student a long-term archiving service in conjunction with a service such as DropBox, Box, or even Amazon's own cloud storage and file sharing offerings makes sense for important documents but becomes cost-prohibitive for storage of music and video libraries which are better suited to other storage options anyway.
In this case, "web" is a synonym for "internet". The context made it very clear.
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that's what makes it so cool. onsite tape robots are boring. streaming the data over the internet and waiting on the cloud to restore your backup is the awesomeness
In that case, it's obviously not for you.
Some of us, however, are capable of planning ahead. I notice you said "restore from a backup." Note that this is not for backing up and restoring data you need to have available on a live basis. This is for truly *archive* data--data you don't need on a day-to-day basis but might need to retrieve in special cases. It will not, generally speaking, be a backup at all; it's your primary store of this data. Such data doesn't need to be retrieved on a moment's notice (if it was, you'd be storing it in a more expensive online store).
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
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.
> Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
I don't. It'll be at least a few hours until FedEx arrives with the new server hardware in the best case, and a few weeks before we get a new building and our clothes stop smelling of smoke (and zombies) in the worst case.
Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?
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.
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That's why people have onsite and offsite backups. If you need it right now, use the onsite backup, if it's not already available from online or nearline storage.
But it's also good to have offline backups, in case your building gets hit with an airliner or something. In which case, having absolute immediate access to that data may not be as high a priority as executing the disaster recovery bringup plan. (If you have an offsite backup datacenter, well, why aren't you mirroring?).
This service is for those companies who may not be big enough to afford to go tape storage (big investment), but may only have a few TB they store on backup hard drives and such. Rather than having to arrange for offsite storage, they can use Amazon to do it cheaply and effectively. I also see it as a play for Amazon as a virtual business - Amazon handling all your IT and server needs between EC2/S3/etc so a business doesn't actually have exist anywhere - employees work from home, a token post office box is the street address, etc.
Though it is a good question - once a job is submitted and the data is ready a few hours later, how long is it available for?
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.
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This service is for those companies who may not be big enough to afford to go tape storage (big investment), but may only have a few TB they store on backup hard drives and such. Rather than having to arrange for offsite storage, they can use Amazon to do it cheaply and effectively. I also see it as a play for Amazon as a virtual business - Amazon handling all your IT and server needs between EC2/S3/etc so a business doesn't actually have exist anywhere - employees work from home, a token post office box is the street address, etc.
I suspect the latter is going to be pretty common. If you're running something fully cloud hosted like imgur or reddit existing Amazon services were pretty expensive for your long-term backups; a lot of wasted money on retrieval speed that you didn't need. This finally gives the last piece of the storage puzzle: long-term cheap backups and archiving. Previously your best bet was to either download the data yourself, or use their physical drive service where you ship media to them and have them load up the data for you.
Honestly, at this point what service doesn't Amazon offer when it comes to your computing setup? (modulo the more general objections to cloud computing of course)
Myself I'll probably start using them for my home computer backups. 500GB * $0.01 is just $5 a month. I'm really looking forward to seeing rdiff-backup-like tools with proper delta support.
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.
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
This could be used either way. If you are using it as an archival medium, it is less of a hassle than finding three facilities of your own (the promise is that there are at least three copies of the data at all times). To get the equivalent from tape, you'd have to buy three tapes. Plus, you need places to store them.
If you are using it as the offsite part of your backup procedure, then it only needs to match the latency of other offsite backups. If you are restoring from a tape that you have stored in a safe deposit box, that also takes three to five hours to restore (it takes time to get to the bank and retrieve the tape, then it takes more time to read from the tape). And truly, that time will rarely matter. If you really lost
1. Your primary data store.
2. Your backup data store.
3. Your local archive copy.
all at the same time, you likely lost your physical hardware as well. Or you are experiencing a security problem that you need to fix before restoring from backup. You could promote your archived data from Glacier to S3 while you were replacing that hardware or fixing your security.
It also may be worth thinking about how this works if you are doing everything AWS. In that case, Multi-AZ RDS provides your primary and backup data stores. It also provides the ability to rebuild your data store from real-time backups. Next, you use snapshots to take regular backups (the equivalent of a local archive copy). Weekly makes sense as RDS can store up to eight days of real-time backups. You keep a few of the most recent snapshots, but you archive most that are older than a month to Glacier. You can still keep the one month, three month, and six month snapshots in the quicker, more expensive storage.
Now, you face a major data problem. Amazon loses two facilities. These happen to be the two facilities with your RDS stores. However, you still have the snapshots (which are stored in more than two facilities). You restore quickly. You only need to go to Glacier if you have data corruption that you don't notice for a month (so that the archive copy that you need has dropped out of the snapshots).
If you are not using AWS for everything, then you are responsible for creating your own primary and backup data stores as well as local archive copies. Other than that, the same issues apply.
Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Amazon is smoking crack.
When I need to restore data RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I restore it from a snapshot on the storage array. Glacier storage would be for when my storage array has gone up in flames and since it'll take me a week(s) to buy a new array and find somewhere to keep it, waiting a few hours for a restore job to be available is ok with me, especially since it'll take 2 weeks to restore the data to my array over my 1gbit internet connection.
Wrong. Now GTFO my lawn.
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.