Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), announced that it would add a new option to store infrequently used data at a lower price on Amazon Simple Storage (S3) instances.
Yesterday, Jeff Barr, a spokesperson for AWS, wrote that the team discovered that many AWS customers keep backups or log files that are nearly never read. Others upload raw data or shared documents for immediate analysis. These files are often accessed frequently right after they are uploaded, with a noticeable drop-off as they age. This data is still important in most cases so durability is a requirement. Although this storage model allows for infrequent access, customers still require quick access to their files. This means that retrieval performance is just as important as ever.
Infrequent Access (Standard-IA) is the new storage class for infrequently used data. It starts at $0.0125 per gigabyte per monthly with a $0.01 per megabyte retrieval fee.
Barr stated that “we believe this pricing model will make the new storage class very economically for long-term storage and backups and disaster recovery, while still allowing to quickly retrieve older data if required.”
Glacier storage was also reduced in price from $0.01 per gigabyte per monthly to $0.007 per megabyte per month.
AWS Lowers the Cost of Storing Infrequently Accessed Data