Q: What can I expect the total cost of ownership (TCO) to be?

Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. Customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours. Your total cost of ownership (TCO) for your Amazon Glacier storage will depend on your data access patterns. Below are several examples illustrating different use cases ranging from deep archives that are never retrieved to active workloads where large portions of data are accessed.

TCO example 1: Let’s assume that you upload 1 PB of data into Amazon Glacier, that the average archive size is 1 GB and that you never retrieve any data. When you first upload the 1 PB, there are upload request fees of 1,048,576 GB x $0.05 / 1,000 = $52.43. Then the ongoing storage costs are 1,048,576 GB x $0.004 = $4,194.30 per month, or $50,331.65 per year.

TCO example 2: Now let’s assume the same storage as example 1 and also assume that you retrieve 3 TB (3,072 GB) a day on average using Bulk retrievals and that the average archive size was 1 GB for a total of 3,072 archives. That’s 90 TB retrieved per month or 8.8% of your data per month. The total retrieval fees per day would be 3,072 x $0.0025 + 3,072 * $0.025 / 1,000 = $7.76, which equates to $232.70 per month and $2,792.45 per year. Adding storage costs, your annual TCO is $50,331.65 + $2,792.45 = $53,124.10. In this example, retrieval fees make up just 5.3% of your total Glacier fees. Your total monthly cost per GB stored including retrieval fees is $0.004222/GB.

TCO example 2: Now let’s assume the same storage as example 1 and also assume that you retrieve 1 TB (1,024 GB) a day on average using Standard retrievals and that occasionally you use Expedited retrievals for urgent requests, averaging 10 GB per day. Here, we assume the average archive size is 1 GB. That’s 30.3 TB per month or 3% of your data per month. The total retrieval fees per day would be (1,024 x $0.01 + 1,024 x $0.05 / 1000) + (10 x $0.03 + 10 x $0.01) = $10.69, which equates to $320.74 per month and $3,848.83 per year. Adding storage costs, your annual TCO is $50,331.65 + $3,848.83 = $54,180.48. In this example, retrieval fees make up just 7.1% of your total Glacier fees. Your total monthly cost per GB stored including retrieval fees is $0.0043/GB.

To learn more about Glacier pricing, please visit the Glacier pricing page.