Greg Linden thinking out loud about Amazon Glacier:

If that is what Amazon is doing here — and I’m guessing, but I think they noticed that a lot of needs are for memory and maybe some rapid access to disk, most disk was empty and there are long times were disk is mostly idle, so they thought, let’s sell it out in a way that doesn’t interfere with real-time work — I really love it.

Indeed an intriguing idea of how to utilize idle capacity for profit.

Original title and link: How Is Amazon Doing Its Glacier Storage? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102076128417589427747/posts/HYxUmesuRM6

James Hamilton:

Cold storage is different. It’s the only product I’ve ever worked upon where the customer requirements are single dimensional. […] How can we deliver the best price per capacity now and continue to reduce it over time? The focus on price over performance, price over latency, price over bandwidth actually made the problem more interesting. With most products and services, it’s usually possible to be the best on at least some dimensions even if not on all. On cold storage, to be successful, the price per capacity target needs to be hit.

Learning something new every day.

Original title and link: Cold Data Storage: Amazon Glacier (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/21/GlacierEngineeringForColdDataStorageInTheCloud.aspx