Amazon on Tuesday rolled out Glacier, a cloud service that charges as little as $0.01 per month per gigabyte for storage.
The company is able to achieve the low costs by optimizing the service for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are acceptable. The price compares to the roughly $0.10 per GB and $0.12 per GB that Google and Amazon are charging, respectively.
Amazon is positioning Glacier as an inexpensive option for companies that don't need constant access to their data. "Use Amazon Glacier if low storage cost is paramount, your data is rarely retrieved, and data retrieval times of several hours are acceptable," Amazon advises. Though Amazon is positioning Glacier as a low-cost alternative to its S3 cloud service, the company plans to "introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies," in coming months.
For more information on Glacier, click here.