| It all depends on what your definition of "high-volume" is, and just how "archival" your access patterns really are. Amazon Glacier runs on BDXL disc libraries (like a tape library). There's nothing truly expensive about producing BDXL media, there just isn't enough volume in the consumer market to make it worthwhile. If you contract directly with suppliers for a few million discs at a time, that's not an issue (you did say high-volume, right?). https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... For medium-scale users, tape libraries are still the way to go. You can have petabytes of near-line storage in a rack. Storage conditions are not really a concern in a datacenter, which is where they should live. (CERN has about 200 petabytes of tapes for their long-term storage.) https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/07/cern-data-centre-pas... If you mean "high-volume for a small business", probably also tapes, or BD discs with 20% parity encoding to guard against bitrot. Small users should also consider dumping it in Glacier as a fallback - make it Amazon's problem. If you have a significant stream of data it'll get expensive over time, but if it's business-critical data then you don't really have a choice, do you? |
This has been a rumor I've heard for quite a while (probably since shortly after Glacier was announced) but has it ever been confirmed?