AWS has unveiled a new cloud-based storage service priced at a phenomenally low $1 per terabyte (TB) per month – the equivalent to 728,177 floppy disks, or the entire monthly data output of the Hubble Space Telescope (which generates 10TB annually).
The service, dubbed Glacier Deep Archive, is intended for data that is only needed infrequently and at $0.00099/GB/month costs less than on-premises tape storage, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said at the Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas Wednesday.
AWS promises 99.99999999999 percent durability for the data. Jassy promised data would be accessible “within hours, rather than days”.
The death of tape has been proclaimed before, but the tape storage industry has thus far shown no sign of disappearing; innovations on the aging technology have been continuing, with throughput rates and capacity continuing to improve.
Tape, its advocates say, is cheap, secure (offline), resilient and energy efficient and is still home to much of the world’s data.
Dropbox, for example, earlier this year announced that one quarter of its “Magic Pocket” (storage infrastructure) would be be built on shinged magnetic recording (SMR) drives by 2019.
Read this: Dropbox Bets the Farm on Shingled Magnetic Recording
An annual tape media shipment report detailing year-over-year shipments showed a record 108,457 petabytes (PB) of total tape capacity (compressed) shipped in 2017, an increase of 12.9 percent over the previous year.
What those figures look like 2019 (when Glacier Deep Archive rolls out) to 2020 is an open question.
“We have a lot of customers with gobs of data,” Jassy said in his keynote at the AWS conference. “And these are pieces of data that are even less frequently than what people access on Glacier.” (AWS’s existing data archiving service).
He added: “People today are managing that with tape. If you’ve ever had the joy of managing tape, it’s no picnic…”
AWS’s existing Glacier archiving service comes with benefits tape can’t compete with , like query-in-place functionality, allowing users to run analytics directly on archive data at rest.
It was not immediately clear from Jassy’s speach if the new service offers similar functions, but at that price point, many tape advocates may be tempted to free up some real estate.
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