Can Amazon Glacier replace tape drives?

August 24, 2012 | By Paul Mah

 

Amazon Web Services has expanded its cloud services portfolio with the launch of a low-cost archiving service called Amazon Glacier, which you can read more about here.
In a nutshell, Glacier incorporates multiple levels of checks and data distribution to ensure that it is not subjected to silent data rot. Indeed, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) says Glacier is designed to provide an impressive average annual durability of 99.999999999% for a given archive, though data retrieval may take a few hours.
Given how Amazon Glacier eliminates the need for upfront investment in expensive tape arrays and does away with the need to keep the equipment powered and manned, will Amazon's latest cloud offering eventually replace tape drives?

 

From a cost perspective, Jack Clark of ZDNet doesn't think this will happen. Clark spoke to tape specialist Quantum, and obtained the cost breakdown of storing 10PB in tape systems over a period of five years. He came up with a total price of $670,000, the majority of which went into a high-end tape storage array costing $450,000. Storing the same amount of data on Glacier though, will set you back by $6.3 million, Clark says.
Though Clark concedes that Glacier does have its advantages, the price difference is too large to ignore. He writes, "it seems tape is still king for very large storage deployments. The cloud has a way to go yet."
Wired is even less sanguine, and warned of a potential landmine hidden in the finer details of the convoluted data access charges related to retrieval. "If the price is based on how long it takes you to download the archives, then the cost is limited by download speeds. But if the cost is based on how much you request in an hour and you request a large file that can't be broken into chunks, the costs could skyrocket."
Just how bad can it get? Well, applying the worst-case scenario to a 3 terabyte archival that couldn't be split into smaller chunks, Wired estimated that charges could be as high as $22,082. Amazon has since clarified that a key criterion--the billable peak rate--is calculated based on the "size of the archive, divided by four hours, minus the pro-rated 5 percent free tier." That lowers the cost significantly, but also serves to confirm that businesses should steer clear of large archives.
Another nightmare scenario, posted on Hacker News, put it this way--"If you wrote an automated script to safely pull a full archive, a simple coding mistake, pulling all data at once, would lead you to be charged up to 720 times what you should be charged!"
The negative sentiments towards Amazon Glacier do make it seem unlikely that it will replace tape drives in the near future. However, I would love to hear the opinions of actual IT professionals and executives in the field. Would you consider using it? - Paul Mah (Twitter @paulmah)

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