AWS Announces Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (Z-IA)

Amazon S3's new lowest cost storage class offers a single Availability Zone storage option for infrequently accessed data such as copies of data, backups, off-site compliance, and disaster recovery

SEATTLE--()--Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), announced Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) One Zone-Infrequent Access (Z-IA), a new Amazon S3 storage class that stores objects in a single Availability Zone. Amazon 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 disaster recovery purposes. S3 Z-IA is available today in all commercial AWS Regions. To get started using S3 Z-IA visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/.

AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity 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 the highest level of resilience. With Amazon S3 Z-IA, customers can now store infrequently accessed data within a single Availability Zone at 20 percent 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, Vice President, 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 Amazon 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 fully integrated with all Amazon S3 features, such as S3 Storage Class Analysis, S3 Object Tagging, S3 Lifecycle policies, and Cross-Region Replication. S3 Z-IA 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. is the leading online retailer and manufacturer of high-quality 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 Senior Vice President, Shutterfly. “We’re excited about S3 Z-IA, which will allow us to be operationally efficient while protecting our customers' photos.”

Nearmap is a global leader in the 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 of Vision Systems, Nearmap. “Using S3 Standard-IA, we’ve managed to reduce our storage costs, despite our data footprint growing significantly 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 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 back up,” said Philipp Berner, Co-Founder & 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.”

About Amazon Web Services

For nearly 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 54 Availability Zones (AZs) within 18 geographic regions and one Local Region around the world, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

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Release Summary

AWS announced Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) One Zone-Infrequent Access, a new Amazon S3 storage class that stores objects in a single AZ.

Contacts

Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline, 206-266-7180
Amazon-pr@amazon.com
www.amazon.com/pr