Amazon Wants To Replace Tape With Slow But Cheap Off-Site "Glacier" Storage 187
Nerval's Lobster writes with a piece at SlashCloud that says "Amazon is expanding its reach into the low-cost, high-durability archival storage market with the newly announced Glacier. While Glacier allows companies to transfer their data-archiving duties to the cloud — a potentially money-saving boon for many a budget-squeezed organization—the service comes with some caveats. Its cost structure and slow speed of data retrieval make it best suited for data that needs to be accessed infrequently, such as years-old legal records and research data. If that sounds quite a bit like Amazon Simple Storage Service, otherwise known as Amazon S3, you'd be correct. Both Amazon S3 and Glacier have been designed to store and retrieve data from anywhere with a Web connection. However, Amazon S3 — 'designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers,' according to the company — is meant for rapid data retrieval; contrast that with a Glacier data-retrieval request (referred to as a 'job'), where it can take between 3 and 5 hours before it's ready for downloading."
still to expensive for me (Score:5, Informative)
my company pays for offsite storage of our tapes and i did some quick math
$2000 a month to store over 1000 tapes for us. I think the minimum bill is like $1500 if you only have a few tapes
$.01/GB is $10 to $20 per LTO-4 tape per month. i know the specs are less but ive seen LTO-4 tapes hold close to 4GB of data.
i send out one tape per month for storage and keep a bunch more locally. so even on the cheap end that's $240 per month for the first year.
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i know the specs are less but ive seen LTO-4 tapes hold close to 4GB of data.
That's 4TB, right?
Re:still to expensive for me (Score:4, Informative)
yep
specs say 1.6TB max compressed but i've seen my tapes hold 3TB and 4TB. LTO-5 is even better but too expensive.
PHB is always complaining about the cost of our off site storage so this made me look at it right away. and LTO4 is fast if you have decent server hardware
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What kind of data are you backing up? 3-4TB seems WAY above average. We get about 2TB per LTO-4 tape.
Re:still to expensive for me (Score:5, Informative)
The cost for Glacier Storage is $10 per Terabyte per month. Not sure why you are saying it's $10 - $20 per 4GB, perhaps you meant 4TB, I'm not familiar with LTO Tapes. If you are storing about 4TB of data, that would be $40/month for Glacier. However, reading back data will incur costs of $10 per Terabyte retrieved.
I probably would never use Glacier for storing internal document records, but for safely archiving DB records/snapshots and usage logs from services running on an EC2 instance after running them through analytics and aggregation, it seems like an excellent service.
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it would be fine for internal records as long as you encrypt the archive before you send it. this to me would seem like a great back up service just not your primary data storage facility.
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Re:still to expensive for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I don't think this is competitive with tape robots for large operations. I see it as gaining inroads, at least at the current price point, among customers who don't have that kind of equipment onsite, so would be otherwise using regular backup services for their archival needs. By adding Glacier to the existing S3 service, as a cheaper but higher-latency storage option for stuff that you're keeping "just in case" (lawsuit/whatever) as opposed to for likely access, Amazon basically incrementally expands the range of use-cases they're competitive in.
Re:still to expensive for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your organisation is too big for Glacier.
When you're big enough, it usually pays off to do stuff in-house, as you have economy of scale.
Everyone smaller than that, is struggling to do proper back-ups. I for one, have something like 50 GB of data to backup. Way too small for tape. It's HD size. But HDs are not exaclty suitable to drop in a tote bag and take home on the train. Also they're a bit expensive to have a new HD every week/month so you have to rotate, making the transport even worse. I've looked into using memory cards or USB sticks, but I need 64GB ones which are still very expensive. A service like this I should seriously look into (especially now I have a 20 Mbit up/down Internet connection).
Privacy remains an issue of course.
Re:still to expensive for me (Score:4, Informative)
At the 50GB level, that is where this service becomes useful. For maximum security, I'd create a TrueCrypt volume, stuff all the stuff needing to go into the archive into it, gpg sign the volume, and upload the volume and its signature. That would mean 50 cents a month indefinitely, but at the minimum, if the upload is successful, Amazon would be storing the data on a SAN with at least RAID 5 or 6 on the backend.
Of course, with a Blu-Ray burner, I can spend a couple bucks and burn the data onto BD-R media to store indefinitely.
For business critical data, perhaps the best thing would be both burning a local copy to optical media, then uploading a TC container to AWS. This allows recovery in a lot more circumstances. This way, one doesn't need to sit there waiting for stuff to get readied, then download, but if there are no working local copies, the data is still accessible.
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At the 50GB level, that is where this service becomes useful. For maximum security, I'd create a TrueCrypt volume, stuff all the stuff needing to go into the archive into it, gpg sign the volume, and upload the volume and its signature. That would mean 50 cents a month indefinitely, but at the minimum, if the upload is successful, Amazon would be storing the data on a SAN with at least RAID 5 or 6 on the backend.
Of course, with a Blu-Ray burner, I can spend a couple bucks and burn the data onto BD-R media to store indefinitely.
For business critical data, perhaps the best thing would be both burning a local copy to optical media, then uploading a TC container to AWS. This allows recovery in a lot more circumstances. This way, one doesn't need to sit there waiting for stuff to get readied, then download, but if there are no working local copies, the data is still accessible.
For 50GB you may as well use regular S3 storage... at 12 cents/GB, that's $6/month and you have instant access to your data, no need to wait 3 to 5 hours to do a restore from Glacier storage (and they say "most jobs" can be retrieved in that timeframe, they didn't say if 5 hours is the upper bound). If you save yourself an hour or two during the year when doing a critical file restore, then your saved labor costs should cover the additional cost of using S3.
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For 50GB, given an average internet connection and a 4 hour retrieval delay, I expect that most of your total down time is going to be spent downloading -- you can't open a partially-downloaded truecrypt volume,
Re:still to expensive for me (Score:4, Informative)
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It's not unheard of to run a website off a 10 Mbit line, but transferring 50 GB over a 10 Mbit line is going to take over 113 hours.
You're off by a factor of ten: 50GB / 10Mbps = 11.37 hours.
Still, point taken.
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Hopefully, you're doing incremental backups. Doing full 50GB backups each day is a bit of a waste, unless your use case requires it for some reason.
Re:still to expensive for me (Score:4, Interesting)
Centon DataStick Pro 64gb is about 35$ each. I bet if you buy 50 of them, they are cheaper. Get a good fire safe, and store one on site, one off site.
You forgot to include labor costds to pay someone to plug them into the backup server, swap them out, ship them offsite, and keep track of them.
But even if you exclude labor costs:
50 of those memory sticks cost $1750, if you split them between offsite and onsite, and have 2 copies of the data on each set, that's gives you 768GB of storage (50 / 2 / 2 * 64), which would cost about $8/month on Glacier, so you could store that data for more than 15 years for what it costs you to buy the memory sticks.
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And at a wonderful 8 MB/s write time, it will take over 2 hours to fill the thing. That's the best case scenario. It will probably take longer. Write times on these USB flash drives are atrocious.
So your 64mbit write time to a cheap flash drive is atrocious? How much does 64mbit of upstream network connectivity cost?
Re:still to expensive for me (Score:4, Interesting)
my company pays for offsite storage of our tapes and i did some quick math
$2000 a month to store over 1000 tapes for us. I think the minimum bill is like $1500 if you only have a few tapes
$.01/GB is $10 to $20 per LTO-4 tape per month. i know the specs are less but ive seen LTO-4 tapes hold close to 4GB of data.
i send out one tape per month for storage and keep a bunch more locally. so even on the cheap end that's $240 per month for the first year.
Compress your data before you send it to Amazon and you'll have a more fair comparison. An LTO-4 tape holds 800GB native, so your thousand tapes is 800TB of data, which would cost you $8000/month on Amazon Glacier.
If you store multiple copies of your data (to protect against tape failure) and could get by with only 200TB of Glacier space, then it might be cost effective, lower labor costs in loading tapes and shipping them offsite, and dropping maintenance on your tape library (or libraries) may also sway the decision.
The numbers change for LTO-5 (1.5TB native), but then you're looking at a large capital cost to swap out your tapes and upgrade your tape drives.
I'm in a little different situation - I have my data replicated to a colocated storage array with less than 100TB of data. Amazon Glacier storage would cost about the same as I pay in maintenance on the array (ignoring colocation fees). Glacier is not a drop-in replacement for the array, since the storage array also runs my DR VMware cluster, but it may be more cost effective to get rid of the colocated array cabinet and VMware cluster hardware and rent some VM's with a small amount of storage for the critical servers I need for disaster recovery, using Glacier to store the rest of my data.
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nope
most of my 1000 some tapes are ancient DLT. i have about 40 LT-4 tapes in storage. even by itself that is like $800 per month if you figure 2TB on average.
the $2000 monthly charge includes shipping off site. guy comes once a month and i give him a tape. takes a few minutes. what labor cost? takes 5 minutes to take it out of the robot.
and the above doesn't include another 100TB archive i have as well at 10TB or so of tapes that i rotate for some other backups for archives.
i can see this working for small
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nope
most of my 1000 some tapes are ancient DLT. i have about 40 LT-4 tapes in storage. even by itself that is like $800 per month if you figure 2TB on average.
the $2000 monthly charge includes shipping off site. guy comes once a month and i give him a tape. takes a few minutes. what labor cost? takes 5 minutes to take it out of the robot.
and the above doesn't include another 100TB archive i have as well at 10TB or so of tapes that i rotate for some other backups for archives.
i can see this working for smallish businesses
But you're not storing 2TB of data on single LTO-4 tape, you're storing 800GB of compressed data on a tape, so those 40 tapes are holding 3.2TB of data. You can apply the same (or better) compression to the data that the LTO drive does before you ship your data to Amazon, so you need to look at the native capacity of the tapes, not the compressed capacity. Let your backup software do the compression and Amazon will store the same amount of data that you can store natively on a tape.
If you have 500 DLT1 tap
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no i'm storing 2TB and sometimes more on an LTO tape. when i first noticed i couldn't believe but i asked around on some backup forums and people said that its true. LTO tapes will frequently store a lot more data than they are rated for.
i'm using an HP MSL 8096. except for a bunch of bad drives that were replaced under warranty i haven't had stuck tapes or any other problems. if i need to pull a tape out i look in Netbackup for the tape # and slot #. issue the command to unlock the magazines. pull them out
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no i'm storing 2TB and sometimes more on an LTO tape. when i first noticed i couldn't believe but i asked around on some backup forums and people said that its true. LTO tapes will frequently store a lot more data than they are rated for.
i'm using an HP MSL 8096. except for a bunch of bad drives that were replaced under warranty i haven't had stuck tapes or any other problems. if i need to pull a tape out i look in Netbackup for the tape # and slot #. issue the command to unlock the magazines. pull them out. pull tape out. takes a few minutes total time.
i buy HP branded LTO-4 tapes for $30 each. maybe $32. they are so cheap and store so much i don't rotate that much. just on data that we don't need past 6 months. i buy 40 tapes per year. i even have a secret stash of backups with a lot more data than i send offsite. its cheaper buying LTO-4 tapes than calling the backup company to bring back a tape the next day. even if its only once a year.
and i remember calling PHB and asking for 300 DLT tapes which cost $25,000 back in the day
You don't seem to understand the distinction between compressed storage and native storage.
I fully believe that you're writing 2TB of data to your LTO-4 tape drive and it's storing that data on the tape. But it's still writing only 800GB of data to the tape, but the tape drive uses built-in compression software to compress the data while writing. It's completely transparent to you and the application writing to the drive (well, most backup software is aware of tape drive compression and can turn it off if i
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A few things here - your math is off as others have pointed out.
However, all the Amazon offerings are basically more expensive than doing it yourself, if you can utilize your own capacity 100%.
However, consider carefully even your own example. First you need to own an LTO drive, and a bunch of tapes. Those tapes aren't cheap, and if you only have a few GB of data to store then 99% of that tape is wasted. Then as you point out that warehouse has a minimum bill.
Then consider administrative overhead. You n
And simple (Score:5, Funny)
With stubble on the face. You're
Returning to a place sure
To need a smoother face, pure.
Burma Shave
Re:And simple (Score:4, Informative)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma_shave [wikipedia.org]
the tl:dr version
back when folks drove down the roads at less than Mach 5 there was a company that had series of signs with sayings
Setup for joke
Second line of Joke
Punchline of Joke
Burma Shave
(they sold shaving cream)
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The Burma Shave thing was never funny for me, because I'm not in the US and so has none of the local knowledge of their advertising.
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This is from the 30's and 40's.
No one capable of participating in an online forum is old enough to actually remember/witness Burma Shave ads.
That's even the "meta" part of why its supposed to be funny.
damn whippersnappers (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong. Now GTFO my lawn.
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"Job" control? (Score:4, Funny)
Do you have to submit a properly-formatted JCL card to get your data back?
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Not if it can be retrieved within 5 hours.
(ex OS-390 programmer)
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Everybody in the cloud! (Score:4, Funny)
Where should I put sensitive documents that must be safely stored for a long time? In the cloud, of course!
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If by "cloud" you mean a remote location, yes.
Proper backup procedures generally include a on-site backup, plus an off-site. The "cloud" is perfect for an off-site backup.
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By "cloud" I (like everybody) mean a 3rd party.
Re:Everybody in the cloud! (Score:4, Insightful)
Where should I put sensitive documents that must be safely stored for a long time? In the cloud, of course!
Yeah, going to a specialized 3rd party provider for safe long term storage is insane, you'd never put anything valuable in a bank vault would you? Would I put them in any random cloud? Not any more than I'd store my valuables in a shed, but with the right agreements in place on redundancy, backups, access control procedures and so on... maybe. Perhaps I'd use two and have redundant providers too. At least a company you have to remember that either way it's going to be run by people, whether you outsource it or not there could be bad apples. Maybe you think you can smell a bad one better among your own employees than they can, but most lack good self-assessment skills.
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Yeah, Iron Mountain seems to have made a pretty good business out of doing just this. The only difference with Amazon is that they don't send a truck to pick up your tapes.
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You know that governments gurarantee bank deposits everywhere, because when they didn't people simlpy didn't put their money at the banks, right?
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It is an off-site backup that can go away in a poof at any time.
Also, where do you keep the encryption keys? In a self maintained archive like the one you want to replace?
So ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So ... (Score:5, Funny)
Admit it, you've been waiting years to use that joke, haven't you?
Unusable for Us. (Score:2)
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Though ideally, one does not use such a service to replace local tape backups, but instead to a
services on top (Score:3)
I look forward to see what services are built on top of this. Easy and cheap backup?
Humans in the loop? (Score:3)
A robotic tape system would generally give you your data back in a few minutes at most, but Amazon is saying you can expect multiple hours of waiting. I'm assuming this system is literally based on people moving around boxes of tapes and inserting them into tape readers; inconvenient but reassuring in its own way. Perhaps they've managed to automate things even further, say by setting up carts of hundreds of tapes carried around by a forklift that get plugged into the robotic tape loading system.
Also sound like an interesting operations challenge though in trying to co-ordinate all the read request jobs when your customers can store as little as 1 byte. You can see why they penalize any attempt to actually read your data, especially if you send in a read request job within a short time period of storing the data.
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Pretty quick, really. (Score:2, Informative)
It usually takes us a couple days to put in the request, get the tapes from offsite, then restore the data, hoping we picked the right dates.
So... (Score:2)
will system meltdowns on Glacier be referred to as Jökulhlaup [wikipedia.org]?
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Marketing (Score:2)
This sounds amazingly like someone put money into a data storage system that turned out to be far slower than they'd wanted. Now marketing is picking up the slack by calling it Glacier.
In other words, they're stuck trying to sell white salmon by claiming "Guaranteed to never turn pink in the can!"
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Actually, it sounds like a network engineer asking how to better utilize the terrabits of available DOWNSTREAM bandwidth that Amazon has available. Running servers by its very nature primarily uses UPSTREAM bandwidth (serving content), so having people send them loads of data often and rarely reading it I'm sure will do wonders to better utilize that available bandwidth, not to mention backups/archives often happen during non-peak periods its a win-win for Amazon.
Potentially a good service - needs a consumer tool (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide long term archival tools for end users. This firm would spend its energy focused on front end tools for the end user and make use of Amazon's back end long term storage for the actual infrastructure.
There are many amateur and even professional photographers, for example, with almost no alternatives for very long term storage. Home writable media is nearly all flawed in terms of true long term storage. I'm sure there are many use cases in this space.
In terms of mid-size and larger companies, I think a critical feature will need to be a simple interface that encrypts at the client side prior to sending the data using a private key only available on the client side. I cannot think a responsible I.T. professional would store company critical or customer data on a third party site like that without such protections in place.
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I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide [...] tools for end users.
You hit the nail on the head about AWS' goal: They are providing the APIs for others to develop consumer-level tools and products by utilizing their existing infrastructure. Everything, from EC2 to S3 to R53, is geared towards developers (which will then market to end users) by providing full functionality via an API. Glacier is no exception, and as you said, there will be great tools available for end users for
Where are the S3 tools now? (Score:2)
Where are all the good end-user tools for S3 now?
You can find one or two, but it's curious that a Google search for "Amazon S3 client comparison" turns up links from 2009 and 2010.
More curious is the fact that Dropbox, SugarSync, the MS solution, Google's new solution etc seem to be thriving and providing exactly the kind of services that you'd expect third party S3 clients to provide.
I'm not saying these clients don't exist, but I don't seem to find them very easily compared to other cloud storage options,
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Dropbix IS a consumer interface to S3.
https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en [dropbox.com]
"Once a file is added to your Dropbox, the file is then synced to Dropbox's secure online servers. All files stored online by Dropbox are encrypted and kept securely on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) in multiple data centers lo
Dropbox and SugarSync are built on S3 (Score:3)
Dropbox and SugarSync both are applications using Amazon S3 for infrastructure (SugarSync says they use "two carrier-grade data centers, including Amazon's S3 facility.") So
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Jungle Disk does transparent folder sync a la Dropbox on top of S3 (or Rackspace), and also lets you mount your cloud store as a filesystem, with clients provided for Windows, OS X and Linux.
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Where are all the good end-user tools for S3 now?
As others have mentioned, Dropbox and SugarSync are consumer interfaces to S3. I think the fact that Amazon references "objects" and "buckets" in S3 terminology is directly because they didn't really build S3 to be an "online file system" type service (though s3fuse [google.com] provides it). They intended to be merely the backend for the consumer services you mentioned.
That being said, clients aren't always strictly downloadable software. My most-used S3 client is buil
Glacier storage? (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently someone at Amazon didn't watch the long term weather forecast - climate change means all the glaciers will be gone in a few decades.
Move your IT department to Amazon Cloud Services (Score:2)
This is essentially what Amazon (and Google mail/docs for that matter) is doing - Aiming to become your company's new IT department. No CEO in their right mind is going to pay multiple salaries/benefits for a staffed IT department when they can get it from Google and Amazon way cheaper. Even if they pay $10k/month, that's cheaper than paying to staff a 4 person IT departement.
And before you start in about how this helps small startups who can't afford and IT staff, well think again. They can't afford the
Someone tell the DEA (Score:2)
They obviously could use some help [slashdot.org].
To put it in even more layman terms (Score:3)
It's $10/month per 1TB which imho is pretty fair. Maybe not doable if you have 1,000 1TB tapes like someone else posted but for most other businesses that's not bad.
Retrieval vs Transfer Out? (Score:2)
The examples all use the Retrieval pricing:
http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/ [amazon.com]
Not having ever used AWS, I'm wondering what is the difference between a "Transfer Out" and a "Retrieval"?
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You could read the page you linked to for the answer. That page defines data transfer:
Worst name ever (Score:2)
Okay, I thought Google Play was a terrible name, but Amazon Glacier leaves me speechless.
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I advise you to never look into open-source image editing software, then...
ooh, ooh, I'll backup the Internet to the cloud! (Score:2)
for faster access, you know. http://downloadinternet.funnypart.com/ [funnypart.com]
First Post (Score:2)
Well I would have got first post if I wasn't using Amazon Glacier for my swap file.
Wait... (Score:2)
You mean "Web Scale" is a term that people ACTUALLY use? I thought that that youtube video was just exaggerating for theatrical effect.
*face palm*
PACS! (Score:2)
Re:Welcome to teh FailBoat, Amazon. (Score:5, Informative)
what about 5 year old billing records for a customer/partner inquiry or lawsuit. i've had to compile those and a 2 week wait was OK in almost every case
Re:Welcome to teh FailBoat, Amazon. (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe this is intended for archival data that is unlikely to be needed, especially not in full, not operational data that you might need to do a full restore from. The kind of data that, in the past, you might file into a tape archive stored in a basement somewhere, "just in case" it was ever needed.
Re:Welcome to teh FailBoat, Amazon. (Score:5, Informative)
Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Amazon is smoking crack.
You seem to be confusing backups necessary for day-to-day business continuity with archival records storage typically not required for day-to-day business continuity. If the data stored on Glacier can be encrypted and the encryption/decryption keys under the control of the client and not accessible under any circumstances to Amazon, then Glacier might be a viable option for organizations. Regulatory compliance in many fields / industries could potentially rule out the use of such a service as Glacier. Although for the typical home user or student a long-term archiving service in conjunction with a service such as DropBox, Box, or even Amazon's own cloud storage and file sharing offerings makes sense for important documents but becomes cost-prohibitive for storage of music and video libraries which are better suited to other storage options anyway.
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If the data stored on Glacier can be encrypted and the encryption/decryption keys under the control of the client and not accessible under any circumstances to Amazon, then Glacier might be a viable option for organizations
This is possible with any opaque data storage - a blob is a blob, why would they care if that particular sequence of bytes represents some encrypted data or not?
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This is possible with any opaque data storage - a blob is a blob, why would they care if that particular sequence of bytes represents some encrypted data or not?
This is correct, by the way. According to AWS's docs (I looked it up because I was curious), they automatically encrypt your data on the backend and keep the keys for you. If you want control over the keys, AWS advises you to encrypt your data before transferring it to Glacier.
Re:Welcome to teh FailBoat, Amazon. (Score:5, Informative)
In that case, it's obviously not for you.
Some of us, however, are capable of planning ahead. I notice you said "restore from a backup." Note that this is not for backing up and restoring data you need to have available on a live basis. This is for truly *archive* data--data you don't need on a day-to-day basis but might need to retrieve in special cases. It will not, generally speaking, be a backup at all; it's your primary store of this data. Such data doesn't need to be retrieved on a moment's notice (if it was, you'd be storing it in a more expensive online store).
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"Note that this is not for backing up and restoring data you need to have available on a live basis. This is for truly *archive* data--data you don't need on a day-to-day basis but might need to retrieve in special cases. It will not, generally speaking, be a backup at all; it's your primary store of this data."
But doesn't that seem like an inherent problem? I can see outsourced, online storage as one redundant element in a backup system; but trusting it as a primary store of data, not so much.
Re:Welcome to teh FailBoat, Amazon. (Score:4, Interesting)
This could be used either way. If you are using it as an archival medium, it is less of a hassle than finding three facilities of your own (the promise is that there are at least three copies of the data at all times). To get the equivalent from tape, you'd have to buy three tapes. Plus, you need places to store them.
If you are using it as the offsite part of your backup procedure, then it only needs to match the latency of other offsite backups. If you are restoring from a tape that you have stored in a safe deposit box, that also takes three to five hours to restore (it takes time to get to the bank and retrieve the tape, then it takes more time to read from the tape). And truly, that time will rarely matter. If you really lost
1. Your primary data store.
2. Your backup data store.
3. Your local archive copy.
all at the same time, you likely lost your physical hardware as well. Or you are experiencing a security problem that you need to fix before restoring from backup. You could promote your archived data from Glacier to S3 while you were replacing that hardware or fixing your security.
It also may be worth thinking about how this works if you are doing everything AWS. In that case, Multi-AZ RDS provides your primary and backup data stores. It also provides the ability to rebuild your data store from real-time backups. Next, you use snapshots to take regular backups (the equivalent of a local archive copy). Weekly makes sense as RDS can store up to eight days of real-time backups. You keep a few of the most recent snapshots, but you archive most that are older than a month to Glacier. You can still keep the one month, three month, and six month snapshots in the quicker, more expensive storage.
Now, you face a major data problem. Amazon loses two facilities. These happen to be the two facilities with your RDS stores. However, you still have the snapshots (which are stored in more than two facilities). You restore quickly. You only need to go to Glacier if you have data corruption that you don't notice for a month (so that the archive copy that you need has dropped out of the snapshots).
If you are not using AWS for everything, then you are responsible for creating your own primary and backup data stores as well as local archive copies. Other than that, the same issues apply.
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By the way, one thing Amazon said is that they'll eventually offer transparent archiving of data from S3 to Glacier. That will be really interesting, since you can then back up your data to S3 for instant access, and also have a cheap historical archive of that data going back however long you can afford. Add some transparent client sync solution that works on top of S3 (e.g. Jungle Disk), and this would be a very convenient set up even for home use.
Re:Welcome to teh FailBoat, Amazon. (Score:4, Interesting)
> Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
I don't. It'll be at least a few hours until FedEx arrives with the new server hardware in the best case, and a few weeks before we get a new building and our clothes stop smelling of smoke (and zombies) in the worst case.
Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?
Re:Welcome to teh FailBoat, Amazon. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why people have onsite and offsite backups. If you need it right now, use the onsite backup, if it's not already available from online or nearline storage.
But it's also good to have offline backups, in case your building gets hit with an airliner or something. In which case, having absolute immediate access to that data may not be as high a priority as executing the disaster recovery bringup plan. (If you have an offsite backup datacenter, well, why aren't you mirroring?).
This service is for those companies who may not be big enough to afford to go tape storage (big investment), but may only have a few TB they store on backup hard drives and such. Rather than having to arrange for offsite storage, they can use Amazon to do it cheaply and effectively. I also see it as a play for Amazon as a virtual business - Amazon handling all your IT and server needs between EC2/S3/etc so a business doesn't actually have exist anywhere - employees work from home, a token post office box is the street address, etc.
Though it is a good question - once a job is submitted and the data is ready a few hours later, how long is it available for?
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This service is for those companies who may not be big enough to afford to go tape storage (big investment), but may only have a few TB they store on backup hard drives and such. Rather than having to arrange for offsite storage, they can use Amazon to do it cheaply and effectively. I also see it as a play for Amazon as a virtual business - Amazon handling all your IT and server needs between EC2/S3/etc so a business doesn't actually have exist anywhere - employees work from home, a token post office box is the street address, etc.
I suspect the latter is going to be pretty common. If you're running something fully cloud hosted like imgur or reddit existing Amazon services were pretty expensive for your long-term backups; a lot of wasted money on retrieval speed that you didn't need. This finally gives the last piece of the storage puzzle: long-term cheap backups and archiving. Previously your best bet was to either download the data yourself, or use their physical drive service where you ship media to them and have them load up the d
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This service is for those companies who may not be big enough to afford to go tape storage (big investment)
This whole discussion brings up a (tangential) question - at what scale does tape backup make economic sense nowadays? We're small - an educational unit - and were running tape backups for years. But as our data store grew (we're at ~ 10TB now), and disk hardware became cheaper and smaller, as time has progressed we've found it less expensive to move to disk for both our immediate and offsite backups.
Or is it simply a space argument - you can take tapes offsite without needing a second set of hardware?
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Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?
According to the AWS Blog [typepad.com], 24 hours:
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depends what you need the restore for.
sometimes it's an added benefit that the backups aren't on any network where they can be wiped from the network, for obvious reasons.
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Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?
24 hours, according to the FAQ.
They also support Import/Export, so you can theoretically ship them a portable hard disk, and they'll ship it back to you with all your data on it. If you have a large amount of data and need it as quickly as possible, this is probably the way to go.
I thought you didn't exist! My bad. (Score:3)
What's really amazing and [un]special about you, is that you are The One case! You are the same as everyone, so no one needs things that you don't need, everyone has the same constraints (and lack of constraints) that you do, and your desires represent the desires of humanity.
Congratulations on being 100% of the market.
I have been looking for you, though previously dismissed you as mythical. So tell me: what is the next great product that everyone wants? You, of all people, know the answer to this.
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Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Then use Amazon S3. Reading the article (or even summary, in this case) has not yet been linked to cancer, so give it a try.
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Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Amazon is smoking crack.
When I need to restore data RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I restore it from a snapshot on the storage array. Glacier storage would be for when my storage array has gone up in flames and since it'll take me a week(s) to buy a new array and find somewhere to keep it, waiting a few hours for a restore job to be available is ok with me, especially since it'll take 2 weeks to restore the data to my array over my 1gbit internet connection.
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In this case, "web" is a synonym for "internet". The context made it very clear.
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What they probably mean is they provide a web interface for interacting with the system rather then providing a locally installed application, then downloaded strait through the browser.
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that's what makes it so cool. onsite tape robots are boring. streaming the data over the internet and waiting on the cloud to restore your backup is the awesomeness
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Onsite tape backups also have a tendency to become unreadable if said site burns down. Different products for different use cases.
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WTF is your data center made of? wood and paper?
everything is fire proof these days
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They said they'll have S3 integration later, too. So you could backup to S3, and then archive from S3 to Glacier, with automated archiving policies (I'd imagine stuff like "keep the last 100 versions" or such).
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Some systems are better than others, and some formats are more redundant.
Within a year tapes behave well if you test them and discard the non-functional ones. As archiving media they show the same problems of optical media, altough they take longet to deteriorate.
Oh, and if you save a completely non-redundant file without adding any redundance at backup time, you have a big chance of not recovering it. Whatever media you use (but you'll need to mess a lot with HDs or SSDs to make non-redundant writes).