Amazon announces a cold storage take on the AWS S3 general-purpose cloud storage solution-- S3 Glacier Deep Archive, an alternative to the S3 Glacier offering aimed at making cloud-based archiving more attractive compared to legacy systems.
Glacier Deep Archive is designed for customers with large (of a petabyte or more) volumes of important but seldom accessed data. Usually such raw data is collected and stored for years just in case it is required, or retained for compliance or auditing purposes. Amazon claims Glacier Deep Archive offers the same durable and secure long-term storage as off-premises tape archives, without the hassle involved with such services.
Amazon stores data across 3 or more AWS Availability Zones. The system uses S3-compatible applications, tools, code, scripts and lifecycle rules, and customers can specify the new storage class when uploading objects, alter the storage class of existing objects, or use lifecycle rules to arrange for migration according to object age.
The main difference between Glacier Deep Archive and regular Glacier boils down to minimum storage duration-- whereas Glacier has a 90-day minimum, the minimum for Glacier Deep Archive clocks at 180 days. Another difference involves data retrieval speed, since regular Glacier requires anything from a few minutes to several hours, while Deep Archive demands around 12 hours.
Glacier Deep Archive storage is available now in all AWS regions and both AWS GovCloud regions.