AWS drops cloud storage price to $2/terabyte/month

Amazon Web Services has introduced a new tier of cloud storage that will store a terabyte of data for about $2.00 per month, or $0.002 a gigabyte.

You read that right. One terabyte. Two Australian dollars. Or about $1.40 if you store it in one of Amazon’s US data centres, where the price is just US$0.00099 per gigbayte.

The new tier is called “Glacier Deep Archive” and is aimed at data that’s “collected and immediately processed, then stored for years or decades just in case there’s a need for further processing or analysis.” AWS suggests financial services companies might fancy the service for long-term storage of transaction data, and that it’s a fine way to store security camera footage.

Deep Archive’s low price creates some other costs.

For starters, AWS says retrieving your data can be achieved “in 12 hours or less.” So this is not a service for those with short recovery time objectives. It’s also pricey to retrieve data: $0.024 per gigabyte on top of AWS transfer fees of at least $0.11 per gigabyte.

But AWS reckons you won’t mind those costs, especially if you use either on-prem tape libraries or tape management services, because in both cases you’ll never see a tape again! Throw in the fact that AWS has made Deep Archive able to ingest current tape libraries, and act as a virtual tape library, and it’s clear the cloud colossus really, really, wants take down the tape industry!

Glacier Deep Archive is already available in Australia: AWS’ pricing page lists the service as live in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.