[toomuchtodo]

3 cents/GB is cheap. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper.

$10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).

[ctdonath]

iCloud is $10/TB/mo, albeit for different use cases.

[Spooky23]

If you have moderate volume, you can beat S3 pricing with object solutions like DDN or others. It all depends on your data center capacity and power costs.

[imajes]

If it cost you about $1000 to buy a diskpack (4*6TB drives) you could create backups and send them to at least a half dozen locations for less money than using S3 to store that data.

Yes, S3 is cheap(ish). But given Snowball is a snapshot backup service, it's not comparatively cheaper than it would be to distribute that same data by creating a clone and sending it to a safe place.

[toomuchtodo]

That's not really how business IT works (unless you're sending tape off to Iron Mountain, which has its own costs and storage fees).

S3 is the cheapest "real" business storage option besides Backblaze's new storage offering. S3 can't be compared to shipping disks someplace where they sit offline.

[jasonlotito]

If you are just using it for backup, you wouldn't use S3. You'd use Glacier.

What this offers is a useful way to get TBs of data up to Amazon easily, cheaply, and quickly.