Amazon recently announced S3 RRS starting at $0.10/GB per month, a very palatable 33% less than S3 standard storage. What’s the catch? RRS means reduced redundancy storage, a tier of storage that maintains fewer copies of data than Amazon S3 standard service. According to Amazon, S3 standard storage provides “99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year” and can sustain “the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.” RRS storage provides “99.99% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year” and can “sustain the loss of data in a single facility.”
Why is this interesting to CloudArray customers? Because many CloudArray solutions involve secondary tiers of storage in the cloud with full copies of primary data on-premise. In these cases, RRS is a great cost-saving tradeoff for the secondary storage tier in the cloud with very little impact on overall data availability thanks to the full on-premise copy.
It is important to use this new tier of storage wisely. For those solutions using primary tiers of storage in the cloud without full onsite copies, it may make sense to stick with the standard S3 service.
Because CloudArray makes storage providers and policies flexible and transparent, our customers now have the benefit of a more cost-effective tier of storage for backup, data replication and business continuity solutions to Amazon.
