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Amazon has expanded its selection of Cloud storage products after the retail giant launched Amazon Glacier, a new service that allows companies, and particularly small businesses, to securely host their backups and archive data.

The US giant says that the low-cost service, which is available from upwards of $0.01 per GB per month, has been introduced to provide a place to store data that is âinfrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future referenceâ.




The company touts data suchÂ digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data and long-term database backups as being ideal for Glacier.

Glacier has no upfront fee, which is typical for most enterprise-class storage,. The cost is based on the capacity of storage used at any given time, so thereâs no need to plan for and purchase significant plans in view of data redundancy and future growth, which is something likely to resonate well with smaller, budget-concious companies.

Todayâs launch is also aimed at transitioning small-to-medium sized companies from the traditional on-site backup solution. These can take up space, require administration and can be difficult to catalog. However, Amazon hopes that with Glacier, digital archives can be moved online and stored for a time when they are needed, while it takes care of the menial tasks.

Amazon says that Glacier is available across the US, (Virginia, California and Oregon datacenters), in Asia-Pacific regions and in Europe via its Ireland datacenter.

[Image Credit: Jay Galvin]

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