Definition

Glacier (Amazon Glacier)

Part of the Cloud computing glossary:

Amazon Glacier is a low-cost cloud storage service for data that can tolerate a three- to five-hour retrieval time.

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Amazon is promoting Glacier as a business solution for organizations who want to move archival storage and long-term database backups from tape storage media to the cloud. 

Amazon is charging $0.01 per gigabyte (GB) per month to store data on Glacier. While uploading is free, Amazon is charging a fee for retrieving more than 5% of the customer’s average monthly storage to discourage customers from using Glacier for general storage purposes.   

Glacier can be contrasted with Amazon’s more expensive Simple Storage Service (S3), which is designed for data that needs to be retrieved in real-time and has a starting price of 12.5 cents per GB per month.

This was last updated in September 2012
Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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