

Is There a Landmine Hidden in Amazon’s Glacier?  - danso
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/08/glacier/

======
gvb
Story update: _An Amazon spokesperson says "For a single request the billable
peak rate is the size of the archive, divided by four hours, minus the pro-
rated 5% free tier."_

From tc's excellent analysis <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412886>

\----

In that case, the math would work as follows:

After uploading 3TB (3 * 2^40 bytes) as a single archive, your retrieval
allowance would be 153.6 GB/mo (3TB * 5%), or 5.12 GB/day (3TB * 5% / 30).
Assuming this one retrieval was the only retrieval of the day, and as it's a
single archive you can't break it into smaller pieces, your billable peak
hourly retrieval would be 3072 GB - 5.12 GB = 3066.88 GB.

Thus your retrieval fee would be 3066.88 * 720 * .01 = $22081.535 (719x your
monthly storage fee).

\----

Using the new Amazon (unexplained) numbers...

The billable peak hourly retrieval would be (3072 GB / 4) - 5.12 GB = 768 GB -
5.12 GB = 762.88 GB.

Thus your retrieval fee would be 762.88 * 720 * .01 = $5492.74. Still pretty
expensive.

------
amock
> Amazon was not immediately available for comment, but in all likelihood,
> Glacier is based on older hardware that the company wants to wring some
> extra dollars from before retiring.

This seems unlikely. If it were true then Amazon would be in trouble if the
service became popular and demand exceeded the supply of old hardware.

------
mark_l_watson
I have been reading the comments, and I must say, what a bunch of whimps who
don't understand what the service is for. Man up and try reading the
documentation.

Glacier is for long term logging of important data that you may or may not
need to recover but should be safe if you ever need it. If you need to log
events daily and occasionally recover data for a few days, then Glacier is for
you.

Not your use case? Then look elsewhere.

Amazon priced Glacier for a certain type of archival storage and base the fees
on what it costs them to provide the service, plus a little profit.

------
joshu
> Presumably, Amazon powers off the hardware until it’s needed.

Reporter never heard of tape backup.

~~~
baddox
On the contrary, the author mentions tape backup:

> _It’s the stuff you might normally put on tape in a vault somewhere._

------
nextstep
...and Hacker News makes the news again!

~~~
ahelwer
This article is literally just a digested form of the HN thread from earlier
today.

