Data Storage

Cloud storage is one of the crucial benefits of cloud computing. With cloud storage, you can store your important data on the Internet without having to worry about it. It is more reliable, scalable and solid than on-premise storage systems.

Amongst the various cloud storage providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) aces the cloud world because of its agility and constant innovations.

Being the number one, AWS already has a lot of storage options like Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, and Amazon Storage Gateway. We, today will talk about Amazon Glacier.

The basic function of Amazon Glacier is long-term storage at highly affordable rates. It lets you retain data for months or even years together. Your data in Amazon Glacier is stored at very affordable costs, is secure, durable, flexible and integrated. This data can be retrieved anytime and AWS charges for the same, depending on the frequency of data requests.

Earlier, AWS had one retrieval options for AWS Glacier, Standard Retrievals.

Standard Retrievals

Standard Retrievals enable users to access their archives within hours. Standard Retrievals complete within 3–5 hours.

· To use a Standard Retrieval, set the request to “Standard” in the “Tier” parameter of the Initiate Job API. By default, Standard tier is set if no tier is selected.

· They are priced at $0.05 per 1,000 requests and $0.01 per GB. For example, for retrieval of 500 archives that are 1 GB each, a cost of 500GB x $0.01 + 500 x $0.05/1,000 = $5.025 would be incurred.

· Standard Retrievals are a cheap access to your data for medium emergency cases within hours. For example, Standard Retrievals can be used to retrieve archived media content for restoring backup data, same-day editing, and analyze logs within hours.

In AWS Glacier’s latest update, two more options were added, including:

Bulk Retrievals

Bulk Retrievals is the cheapest retrieval feature in glacier, enabling users to retrieve data up to petabytes. Within 5–12 hours the bulk retrievals are completed.

· To create a Bulk Retrieval, the request needs to be set up for Bulk in the “Tier” parameter of the Initiate Job API.

· They are priced at just $0.025 per 1,000 requests and $0.0025 per GB. For example, retrieving 500 archives that are 1 GB each would cost 500GB x $0.0025 + 500 x $0.025/1,000 = $1.2625.

· Bulk Retrievals enable users to cost-effectively pull a huge amount of data for non-urgent use cases such as analyzing large genomics sequences or transcoding petabytes of raw video content. It is suitable for cases where you can wait untill the next working day.

Expedited Retrievals

Expedited Retrievals allow users to instantly access their data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required.

There are two types of Expedited retrievals:

· Provisioned- Provisioned requests are assured to be available when you need them.

· On-Demand- On-Demand requests are like EC2 and are available the majority of the time.

· From the date of purchase, each unit of provisioned capacity costs $100 per month.

· To use an Expedited retrieval, set the “Tier” parameter request to Expedited of the Initiate Job API. If you have purchased provision capacity, then all retrievals will be automatically served with your Provisioned capacity.

· Expedited retrievals cost is $0.01 per request and $0.03 per GB. For example, retrieving 10 objects with a size of 1GB each, the cost would be 10 x $0.03 +10 x $0.01 = $0.40.

With all these three options of data retrievals, Glacier’s low-cost storage services can be leveraged such a way that the earlier wait of retrieving your data will be lessened with the use of expedited retrievals.

Just like every coin has two sides, Amazon Glacier along with its advantages has its disadvantages as well. Its totally not recommended for situations where the archived data is frequently required and needs to be restored from the Glacier. As in these cases, the retrieval cost charged by AWS won’t be justifiable.

To summarize, this article talks about the flexible enhancements in Glacier usage and the advantageous price reduction on various S3 storage tires.

Using Bitcanopy’s Smartspend, you can get a detailed view of your cloud spend, with highly customized reports that will help you make the best use of Amazon Glacier. At the same time, also helps you make better strategic decisions for the cloud usage of your organization.