Amazon Web Services unveils new data storage tier

AWS is adding a new storage class for data that is accessed infrequently. The new S3 Standard – the Infrequent Access (Standard – IA) storage class – offers the same high durability, low latency and high throughput of the S3 Standard, said AWS.

Customers now have the choice of three S3 storage classes (Standard, Standard – IA and Glacier) that are designed to offer “99.999999999 percent durability”, AWS said.‎ Standard – IA has an availability SLA of 99 percent. The new storage class has all existing S3 features including security and access management, data lifecycle policies, cross-region replication and event notifications.

Prices for Standard – IA start at $0.0125 a gigabyte per month, with a 30 day minimum storage duration for billing, and a $0.01 per gigabyte charge for retrieval (in addition to the usual data transfer and request charges).

Further, for billing purposes, objects that are smaller than 128 kilobytes are charged for 128 kilobytes of storage. AWS said the pricing model will make the new storage class economical for long-term storage, backups and disaster recovery, while still allowing customers to quickly retrieve older data if necessary.

AWS has also reduced prices for its Glacier data storage service. Amazon Glacier has gone down from $0.01 per gigabyte per month to $0.007 per gigabyte per month. The price reduction will take effect automatically and customers do not have to do anything in order to benefit from the cut. The new price is for the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland) regions.