AWS announces general availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, a new storage class that provides secure, durable object storage for long-term retention of data that is rarely accessed. At just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices significantly lower than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data off-site.

Organizations in many market segments (e.g., financial services, healthcare, and government, etc.) are required to retain data for long periods of time to meet regulatory compliance requirements. In addition, there are organizations, such as media and entertainment companies, that want to keep a backup copy of core intellectual property. These datasets are often very large, consisting of multiple petabytes, and yet typically only a small percentage of this data is ever accessed—once or twice a year at most. To retain data long-term, many organizations turn to on-premises magnetic tape libraries or offsite tape archival services. However, maintaining this tape infrastructure is difficult and time-consuming; tapes degrade if not properly stored and require multiple copies, frequent validation, and periodic refreshes to maintain data durability. Additionally, it is difficult or impossible to do machine learning and other types of analysis directly on data stored on tape. Now, with S3 Glacier Deep Archive, customers with large datasets they want to retain for long periods will be able to eliminate both the cost and management of tape infrastructure, while ensuring that their data is preserved for future use and analysis, such as in oil and gas seismic exploration and developing autonomous vehicles. Customers can still use S3 Glacier when they want retrieval options in minutes for archive data, while S3 Glacier Deep Archive is ideal for customers who want the lowest cost for archive data that is rarely accessed. In the event that recovery becomes necessary, the objects can be recovered in as little as 12 hours with S3 Glacier Deep Archive versus days or weeks with off-site tape.

With six different storage class options, Amazon S3 provides the broadest array of cost-optimization options available in the cloud today. All objects stored in S3 Glacier Deep Archive are replicated and stored across at least three geographically-dispersed Availability Zones, designed for 99.999999999% (eleven nines) durability, and can be restored within 12 hours or less. S3 Glacier Deep Archive also offers a bulk retrieval option that lets customers retrieve petabytes of data within 48 hours. Customers can upload data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive over the internet or using AWS Direct Connect and the AWS Management Console, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS DataSync, AWS Command Line Interface, or the AWS Software Development Kit. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is integrated with Tape Gateway, a cloud-based virtual tape library feature of AWS Storage Gateway, so customers using it to manage on-premises tape-based backups can choose to archive their new virtual tapes in either S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.