Cloud cold storage freezes out traditional backup

MEDIA RELEASE

Cloud cold storage freezes out traditional backup

Fronde quick to embrace new AWS Glacier online cloud storage

Wellington, 9 October 2013 – Leading technology company Fronde announced today it will deliver clients low-cost and highly-durable long term storage with AWS Glacier, Amazon’s new online storage service.

At a basic storage price of US 1.2c per GB, per month and hosted in Sydney, Fronde’s Chief Technology Officer, James Valentine says that AWS Glacier and its dramatic price point represents a fundamental shift in long term archival storage - traditional hardware based backup solutions are a thing of the past.

“It represents order of magnitude savings for most customers over traditional tape backup and data archiving solutions. This is particularly true when you look at the durability and redundancy that Glacier and Amazon S3 offer. Furthermore, the incredible economies of scale of AWS make it very difficult for any existing local backup providers to compete.

“I’ve had a customer question whether we misprinted the price of Glacier - the cheapest any other provider could offer was around fifty times the price. Even when network transmission and software/appliance costs are added in Glacier is still significantly cheaper.

“We are delighted that AWS Glacier has reached Sydney and we can help even more of our customers take advantage of this service and help them meet their long-term storage needs.”

Fronde already has a number of customers taking advantage of the existing AWS storage options for their business continuity and disaster recovery and archival requirements, says Valentine.

“We have a number of clients using Amazon S3 as their backup storage medium - itself a highly durable and available service. Glacier takes this a step further, building on S3’s durability and narrowing down onto the archival use case. Unlike S3 where files are always online for immediate access, retrieval of data from Glacier takes several hours. By not being always online AWS is able to reduce the already low S3 storage costs even further.”

According to Valentine, Glacier’s main use by customers will be as a replacement for existing tape storage and Fronde has a simple method to access the service.

“Using our approach will get clients quickly up and running on Glacier and will take care of everything to minimise any change within the existing environment as much as possible. We will help clients with the appropriate architecture and processes to leverage AWS, as a disaster recovery datacentre is quite different to those customers looking for a pure archival solution.”

ENDS.

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