In a world surrounded by tape systems, it’s no wonder that businesses are turning to cloud services to help them store files and sensitive data. With a lack of reliability, tape-based systems have become less and less popular as not only the general population, but big corporations have found value in cloud technology. Amazon has decided to hop on the bandwagon and hopefully continue to pull businesses off of tape systems with their recently announced Glacier web services. This tapeless storage service is nothing new, but with a name like Amazon behind it and its already huge web hosting services, Amazon may have found the link to new revenue.
Already a leader in the world of enterprise storage, it is estimated that the reliability of glacier is going to be about 99.9999999999 percent, or one file object lost for every 100 billion you actually place on the cloud service. Additionally, there are several other cloud-based technologies that do in fact use tape storage, and that’s exactly what Amazon is trying to steer away from. The storage price is fairly reasonable, and actually competitive when it comes to storing data on-site at a business facility. The cost of about $0.01 per gigabyte per month could play a valuable role in saving medium-sized businesses money, especially those that are often wasting valuable space with tape-based data storage.
So what could possibly hold Amazon back from success with its new offering? Amazon is notorious for outages surrounding its other web services. If this were to occur with its cloud-based technology, we could see several customers running for the hills and relying on other data services, or even going back to what it thought were obsolete tape-based systems. The great thing about keeping your data in-house is that you’re never going to lose your data unless something goes wrong with the tape. The great part about older technology is that it’s less prone to failure, unlike newer systems.
Amazon’s service doesn’t come without a price. After the first gigabyte of storage, you’re looking at a cost of about $0.12 per month per gigabyte, which, if you’re a medium business or larger, can add up to a lot of money quite quickly. The good news is that you’ll still have plenty of room to be able to store everything from documents to media and video files, without ever having to worry about running out of storage room.
