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Amazon Glacier

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Glacier

#351

Post by sintaks »

flyt wrote: post #243
nemesisj wrote: post #7

I had a quick skim through the marketing stuff and the FAQs and didn't see anywhere that actually details what the backend of this is. I'd be curious if they're actually using tape, older machines, Backblaze pods, etc. I guess if it's the latter, the time to recover could be an artificial barrier to prevent people from getting cute.

It appears to use S3 as its basic backend. My guess is that S3 has been modified to have "zones" of data storage that can be allocated for Glacier. Once these zones have been filled with data (and of course that data is replicated to another region) the hard drives are spun down and essentially turned off. This is why the cost of retrieval is so high: every time they need to pull data the drives need to be spun back…

Almost spot on. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065

Re: Amazon Glacier

#352

Post by sintaks »

mp99e99 wrote: post #227

I'm with Atlantic.net cloud [AWS competitor, full disclosure]; the price point for storage is great but retrieval seems expensive -- perhaps retrieval is very rare its offset by the savings on the storage. I know you can mail in drives for storage, can you have them mail you drives for retrieval? (for Glacier specifically) Also, prior comments made mention they were using some sort of robotic tape devices, but accord…

I don't think they're loss-leadering on storage, but if they are, they don't think they will be for long. AWS (EC2 and S3 in particular) does very well when it comes to profit margins. I suspect they'd like to keep it that way, and that whatever they're charging gives them some slice of profit, however small.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#353

Post by jackjeff »

revertts wrote: post #330
sreitshamer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking into supporting Glacier in Arq. It sure is cheap -- $10/month for a terabyte.

I'll buy Arq immediately when Glacier gets added

Me too. If it was not for the recurring cost of S3, I would have bought ARG already. It's brilliant software.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#354

Post by cpeterso »

ghshephard wrote: post #36

I'm a long time user of backblaze, and I'm a big fan of the product - it does a great job of always making sure my working documents are backed up, particularly when I'm traveling overseas, and my laptop is more vulnerable to theft or damage. 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,v…

Here are Arq developer Stefan Reitshamer's initial comments on Amazon Glacier:

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/support/arqforum/topic.php?i...

Re: Amazon Glacier

#355

Post by ghshephard »

sintaks wrote: post #339
tc wrote: post #222

Beware that retrieval fee! The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1]. It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour? This…

Former S3 employee here. I was on my way out of the company just after the storage engineering work was completed, before they had finalized the API design and pricing structure, so my POV may be slightly out of date, but I will say this: they're out to replace tape. No more custom build-outs with temperature-controlled rooms of tapes and robots and costly tech support. If you're not an Iron Mountain customer, this p…

The math doesn't come close to replacing tape - basically once you go north of 100 terabytes (just two containers - at my prior company we had 140 containers in rotation with iron mountain) Glacier doesn't make financial or logistical sense. Far cheaper and faster to send your LTO-5 drives via driver.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#356

Post by omh »

ghshephard wrote: post #355
sintaks wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former S3 employee here. I was on my way out of the company just after the storage engineering work was completed, before they had finalized the API design and pricing structure, so my POV may be slightly out of date, but I will say this: they're out to replace tape. No more custom build-outs with temperature-controlled rooms of tapes and robots and costly tech support. If you're not an Iron Mountain customer, this p…

The math doesn't come close to replacing tape - basically once you go north of 100 terabytes (just two containers - at my prior company we had 140 containers in rotation with iron mountain) Glacier doesn't make financial or logistical sense. Far cheaper and faster to send your LTO-5 drives via driver.

Have you considered the cost of the tape loaders? Our loaders cost significantly more over their lifetime than the storage costs of the tapes themselves.

The tradeoffs will be different depending on how many tapes you write and how often you reuse them.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#358

Post by jwr »

Auguste wrote: post #322
jwr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's even more important, you will be able to encrypt your backups without having to disclose the encryption key in case you ever need to restore (client-side encryption and decryption). This is not the case with Backblaze, which is why I switched to CrashPlan — but I'm still looking for other solutions.

Backblaze does support the optional use of a separate encryption key which they claim to never store, but there's no information about whether it is ever disclosed to them or not. There's little information on their website, but it can be set in Settings > Security in the Backblaze client.

You have to provide your encryption key to their website if you want to recover files. That's a show-stopper for me.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#359

Post by jwr »

chmars wrote: post #226
jwr wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it show that? And are you sure we are talking about the encryption key, not the account password?

Settings / Security / Archive Encryption / 448-bit encryption with custom 448-bit key

Then no, it does not worry me. Obscuring password entry in an application that I almost never run is not a problem. Plus, if I do actually run the app and want to enter the password, I don't do it with a bunch of people peering over my shoulder.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#360

Post by andyjohnson0 »

reddit_clone wrote: post #259
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some pretty old commercial organisations out there. One list [1] has several that have existed for over 1000 years. Whether they would be capable of storing data (or would even be interested in doing so) is hard to say, but there have at least demonstrated that long-term organisational continuity is possible, and that presumably requires some organisational 'memory'. Having a long history obviously isn't a…

How about Catholic church? That has lasted a couple of Millennia!

According to Wikipedia the Vatican Library has existed since 1481. Doubtful that many people here would have material that would interest them though.
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