AWS this week introduced lower cost file storage for non-critical files by housing data in one zone only.
AWS Elastic File System (EWS) has two storage classes: EFS Standard and EFS Infrequent Access (IA), which are stored in two geographically separate availability zones. AWS claims four nines availability (99.99 per cent) for both options.
AWS is quoting three nines availability (99.9 per cent) for the two new file storage classes – One Zone and One Zone-Infrequent Access.
AWS Principal Technical Evangelist Channy Yun said in a blog post that the new classes reduce “storage costs by 47 per cent compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes.”
- Standard – $0.03/GB/month
- Standard-IA – $0.025
- One Zone – $0.16/GB/month
- One Zone-IA – $0.0133/GB/month – 92 per cent less than One Zone
AWS likes to say that blended or effective price for Standard file storage is $0.08/GB/month – when 20 per cent of files is in the standard class and 80 per cent in Standard-IA. The equivalent blended price for One Zone storage is $0.043/GB/month.
The One Zone file systems have a lifecycle management policy that moves infrequently accessed files to the One Zone-IA tier after 30 days. Files in One Zone tiers are automatically backed up via AWS Backup and can be restored to any Availability Zone within a Region, or copied to a different Region.
AWS suggests One Zone file storage can be used for developer workloads including build and staging environments, and applications such as analytics, simulation, and media transcoding. Other examples are storing replicas, secondary copies of data residing on-premises, data that can be easily recreated, and data used by applications with built-in replication and high availability features.;
One Zone storage tiers are available in certain AWS data centres in the USA, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, and Sweden, with more regions coming on-stream later this year. AWS said there are no up-front or minimum commitments for EFS One Zone storage and the service is charged according to capacity usage only.
