A new low cost, secure, and highly durable archive storage solution with the operational simplicity of the AWS cloud

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 21, 2012-- Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Amazon Glacier – a secure, reliable and extremely low cost storage solution designed for data archiving and backup. Amazon Glacier is designed for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference. Examples include digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably and durably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01/GB/month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To learn more about Amazon Glacier, visit http://aws.amazon.com/glacier.

Companies typically over-pay for data archiving. First, they're forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth. This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money. With Amazon Glacier, there are no upfront capital commitments, all ongoing operational expenses are included, and businesses can elastically and quickly scale their usage up or down when needed.

Complete Genomics provides human genome sequencing and analysis as a service to academic and biopharmaceutical researchers. “Every day our genome sequencers produce terabytes of data,” said Keith Raffel, Complete’s Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer. “As our company moves into the clinical space, we face a legal requirement to archive patient data for years that would drastically raise the cost of storage. Thanks to Amazon Glacier’s secure and scalable solution, we will be able to provide cost-effective, long-term storage and thereby eliminate a barrier to providing whole genome sequencing for medical treatment of cancer and other genetic diseases.”

Amazon Glacier allows customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, removing the need for hardware provisioning, data replication across multiple facilities, or hardware failure detection and repair. Designed to deliver average annual durability of 99.999999999% for each item stored, the service automatically replicates all data across multiple facilities and performs ongoing data integrity checks, using redundant data to perform automatic repairs if hardware failure or data corruption is discovered. Data uploaded to Amazon Glacier remains safely stored for as long as it is needed with no additional effort from customers.

New York Public Radio is home to leading public radio stations WNYC and WQXR, and is a major producer of original content for public radio in America. “An organization like ours thinks in centuries when it comes to content retention, and long term preservation of our Master Archives is a critical part our mission here at NYPR,” said Steve Shultis, CTO New York Public Radio. “Storing these core assets on traditional media such as local disk and off-site tape exposes us to corruption and even outright-loss of data. We are excited to move our archives to Amazon Glacier, which will be a better long-term solution.”

“Today, most businesses rely on expensive, brittle, and inflexible tape for their archiving solution," said Alyssa Henry, Vice President of AWS Storage Services. “This approach requires expensive upfront payments, is difficult to operate and maintain, and leads to wasted capacity and money. Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well."

Amazon Glacier is available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU-West (Ireland) Regions. For complete pricing details, visit http://aws.amazon.com/glacier.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 28 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and Singapore.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. The new latest generation Kindle is the lightest, most compact Kindle ever and features the same 6-inch, most advanced electronic ink display that reads like real paper even in bright sunlight. Kindle Touch is a new addition to the Kindle family with an easy-to-use touch screen that makes it easier than ever to turn pages, search, shop, and take notes - still with all the benefits of the most advanced electronic ink display. Kindle Touch 3G is the top of the line e-reader and offers the same new design and features of Kindle Touch, with the unparalleled added convenience of free 3G. Kindle Fire is the Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games and web browsing with all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync, Amazon Silk (Amazon's new revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser), vibrant color touch screen, and powerful dual-core processor.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.comwww.amazon.co.ukwww.amazon.dewww.amazon.co.jpwww.amazon.frwww.amazon.cawww.amazon.cnwww.amazon.it, and www.amazon.es. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

 

Source: Amazon Web Services LLC

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