Amazon today unveiled several new extensions to its S3 and other storage capabilities for Amazon Web Services as part of its second annual Storage Day product event. The offerings include the ability to automatically have content in S3 moved to the cheapest form of storage when it is not used for long periods of time.
The new offerings span multiple Amazon storage offerings, including the Simple Storage Service, or S3; the Lustre file system, popular with high-performance computing set-ups; Windows File Server storage; Elastic Block Storage; Elastic File System; AWS Snow; and Data Sync.
For S3, Amazon has removed the need to prepare objects in that storage system to be moved to what’s called S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Those tiers of storage are cheaper than S3’s main storage. AWS will now move a given asset from S3 main storage to the backup tiers automatically after those assets have gone unused for either 90 days or 180 days, respectively.
The results can be big cost savings, Amazon said: “You can get high throughput and low latency access to your data when you need it right away, and automatically pay less than a $1 per TB per month when objects haven’t been accessed for 180 days or more.”
Said Amazon, “Already customers of S3 Intelligent-Tiering have realised cost savings up to 40% and now using the new archive access tiers they can reduce storage costs up to 95% for rarely accessed objects.”
The new Archive Access Tier service is an extension of the S3 Intelligent Tiering unveiled a year ago.
The new offering for Lustre lets a customer set storage usage limits for a team. For Windows File Server, customers can now set up a DNS entry when creating a Windows file share, to eliminate the complexity of providing file access from cloud applications.
In addition, apps running in containers on AWS’s Elastic Compute Service can now directly access a Windows file share:
Container-based Windows workloads running on Amazon ECS can now access Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file shares. This allows ECS to run stateful workloads, content management systems, and other applications that require persistent shared storage. You simply specify the file system id and the mount point in your task definition, and ECS will take care of the rest.
