Insider 'fesses up: Amazon's Glacier cloud is made of ... TAPE

It's October and that show has come around again – IP Expo, the successor to Storage Expo. This year, the UK's "premier IT trade show" took place in Earl's Court, and saw a busy floor with lots of stands, lots of lead-hunting stand staff and the usual assortment of attention-grabbing oddities, like a man dressed as an HP Cloud, …

[dcd]

I have wondered that ...

... in order to wear one of those outfits you have to be fucking desperate, or retarded.

Anyone here care to fess up?

[Tom 38]

Re: I have wondered that ...

When I think of the shit I did at Uni to keep me in beer, petrol and fags, a gig wearing that outfit looks positively fantastic.

[Ausstorageguy]

Re: I have wondered that ...

Petrol to get the taste out of your mouth from the things you did at Uni?

[jabuzz]

No surprise there

Hardly surprising really, there is no way that you can offer storage at this price using anything else. I suspect however that there is a chunk of disk based storage between the customer and the tape libraries.

[Anonymous Coward]

The name should have given it away

Glacier: huge and slow-moving. Hence tape

[Ian 55]

Obviously it was tape

It's only as cheap as chips until you want the data back, then it's rather expensive.

After the online backup service I was using announced it was closing, I looked at Glacier - if a disc failed it would be about as much to use one of the disc recovery services (and they're not cheap) as it would be to get the data off Glacier.

Only for write-only archiving of stuff you have to keep but never want to see again.

Paris, because I never want to see her again either.