Amazon Web Services on Monday announced Amazon Glacier - a low cost storage solution designed for data archiving and backup.

Amazon Glacier is designed for data that is infrequently accessed. 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.

Storing data using Glacier costs from $0.01 per gigabyte per month. Its existing Simple Storage Service (S3) in comparison costs from between $0.125 and $0.055 per gigabyte per month for standard storage. To get the lowest prices, data volumes above 5,000 terabyte are needed. Unlike S3, there is no free tier offered for Glacier.

With Amazon Glacier, there are no upfront capital commitments, all ongoing operational expenses are included, and businesses can elastically scale their usage up or down when needed.

Amazon Glacier allows businesses 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 is stored in Glacier as archives, which can store up to 40TB. They can represent a single file or several files that are uploaded as a single archive. Archives can then be organized as vaults, the access to which can be controlled through Amazon's Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, the company said.

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.