Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) One Zone-Infrequent Access

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) One Zone-Infrequent Access (Z-IA), a Amazon S3 storage class that stores objects in a single Availability Zone.

S3 Z-IA is designed for customers who want a lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data, but do not require the multiple Availability Zone data resilience model of the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-Infrequent Access storage classes. S3 Z-IA is intended for use cases with infrequently accessed data that is also re-creatable, such as storing secondary backup copies of on-premises data, or for storage that is already replicated in another AWS Region for compliance or DR purposes. S3 Z-IA is available in all commercial AWS regions.

AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for BC applications that require rapid failover. Amazon S3 object storage classes (S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA) and Amazon Glacier store data across multiple geographically-separated Availability Zones to offer high level of resilience. With Amazon S3 Z-IA, customers can store infrequently accessed data within a single Availability Zone at 20% lower cost than S3 Standard-IA. In addition, S3 Z-IA offers customers higher availability and durability than self-managed physical data centers, with the added benefit of having to pay only for what they use.

“Customers tell us that the Amazon S3 Standard storage class sets the highest standard for reliable, durable, and highly available object storage. We offer other storage tiers, like Amazon S3 Standard-IA, for highly durable storage of infrequently accessed objects, and Amazon Glacier for highly durable archive storage, because we know customers have different needs for different data,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP, Amazon S3, AWS. “Amazon S3 Z-IA is ideal for customers who want storage for infrequently accessed objects, don’t need the durability of multiple Availability Zones, and want to save cost with our lowest priced storage tier in Amazon S3.“

A single Amzon S3 bucket can store a mixture of S3 Z-IA, S3 Standard, and S3 Standard-IA storage classes, letting storage administrators make decisions based on the nature of the data, data access patterns, and cost without having to change any applications. Customers can use Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically migrate data to lower-cost storage classes as the data ages, or Cross-Region Replication policies to replicate data to another region. For example, with S3 Cross-Region Replication policies, customers can satisfy their data protection needs by automating replication of Standard storage class in one region to S3 Z-IA in another region.

S3 Z-IA is integrated with all Amazon S3 features, such as S3 Storage Class Analysis, S3 Object Tagging, S3 Lifecycle policies, and Cross-Region Replication. It provides customers the flexibility of an additional, lower-cost tier of Amazon S3 storage for their data. Amazon S3 Z-IA is priced at $.01/GB/month.

Shutterfly, Inc., online retailer and manufacturer of personalized products and services.

“As we increasingly use AWS to manage billions of customer photos, Shutterfly is benefiting from multiple tiers of AWS storage offering high durability, availability, and security,” said Satish Menon, CTO and SVP, Shutterfly. “We’re excited about S3 Z-IA, which will allow us to be operationally efficient while protecting our customers’ photos.“

Nearmap, provisioning of frequently updated aerial imagery for businesses, and government via subscription service.

“To capture, store, process, and publish time-critical, high-resolution aerial images requires a platform capable of storing many petabytes of data,” said John Corbett, director, vision systems, Nearmap. “Using S3 Standard-IA, we’ve managed to reduce our storage costs, despite our data footprint growing each month. The introduction of S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access is a good fit for a large portion of our stored data that will help support our continued growth.“

Keepsafe Software, Inc. makes simple mobile apps to protect people’s personal space.

“Today, more than 70 million people use Keepsafe Photo Vault for protecting and storing personal digital content, including photos, videos, and documents using military grade encryption. S3 Z-IA is the perfect storage class for backup,” said Philipp Berner, co-founder and CTO, Keepsafe. “Until now we’d used S3 Standard-IA as the storage class for backup data but we don’t need geographically separated replication of our backups. Typically, copies of our data exists on mobile or desktop clients, making a single-AZ storage offering perfect for our storage needs. Best of all, it took minimal effort to move all our existing data into S3 Z-IA. We set an S3 Lifecycle policy to move our objects from S3 Standard-IA to S3 Z-IA automatically, and since the object location did not change we did not have to update any of our clients.“