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Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. What would be absolutely fascinating is a pay-before-you-go storage service — data cryonics. Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.
Storage experts: I'd love to know more about what might be backing this service. What kind of system has Amazon most likely built that takes 3-4 hours to perform retrieval? What are some examples of similar systems, and where are they installed?
Or in case they are using regular hard drives, you might want to have this kind of time limits in order to pool requests going to a specific set of drives. This would enable them to power down the drives for longer periods of time.
The 3-4 hour estimate may also be artificial. Even if you can in most cases retrieve the data faster, it would be good to give an estimate you can always meet. They might also want to differentiate this more clearly from standard S3.
And we should not forget that it does take time to transfer for example one terabyte of data over network.
I hope they can get the access time down from 3-5 hours to about 1 hour - that's the difference for me between it being a viable alternative for storing backups of my client's web sites or not. I might create a script that uploads everything to Glacier and just keeps a couple of the latest backups on S3 though.
1. http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/08/amazon-glacier.h...
Storage experts: I'd love to know more about what might be backing this service. What kind of system has Amazon most likely built that takes 3-4 hours to perform retrieval? What are some examples of similar systems, and where are they installed?
There'll be a near-line HDD array. This is for the recent content and content they profile as being common-access.
Then there'll be a robotic tape library. Any restore request will go in a queue annd when an arm-tapedrive becomes free they'll seek to the data and read it into the HDD array.
Waiting for a slot with the robot arm - tape drive is what will take 4 hours.
EMC(kinda), Fujitsu etc make these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/emc_tape_sucks_no_mo...
Or is the only way to encrypt it yourself, and then transfer it?
With that said - Backblaze is optimized for working documents - and the default "exclusion" list makes it clear they don't want to be backing up your "wab~,vmc,vhd,vo1,vo2,vsv,vud,vmdk,vmsn,vmsd,hdd,vdi,vmwarevm,nvram,vmx,vmem,iso,dmg,sparseimage,sys,cab,exe,msi,dll,dl_,wim,ost,o,log,m4v" files. They also don't want to backup your /applications, /library, /etc, and so on locations. They also make it clear that backing up a NAS is not the target case for their service.
I can live with that - because, honestly, it's $4/month, and my goal is to keep my working files backed up. System Image backups, I've been using Super Duper to a $50 external hard drive.
Glacier + a product like http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ means I get the benefit of both worlds - Amazon will be fine with me dropping my entire 256 Gigabyte Drive onto Glacier (total cost - $2.56/month) and I get the benefit of off site backup.
The world is about to get a whole lot simpler (and inexpensive) for backups.
I'm curious about data security. It says it is encrypted with AES. But is it encrypted locally and the encrypted files are transferred? I.e. does Amazon ever see the encryption keys? Or is the only way to encrypt it yourself, and then transfer it?
Amazon simultaneously stands for ecommerce and web infrastructure depending on the context. e.g "Hey I want to host my server".. "Why don't you try Amazon". "Do you know where I can get a fair priced laptop?" "Check Amazon".
Is there any other brand that has done this successfully?
Edit: I should have specified internet brand.