Amazon announced a new product today: Essentially they are making their existing Simple Storage Service (S3) product availability with a slightly lower level of availability and durability. The full news is here.
For a place like ICPSR that likes to replicate content to build a robust archival storage solution, this is good news. If the copy I store with Amazon is "only" 99.99% available, I can live that. After all, it's only one copy of many.
We use a similar service from the University of Michigan central IT organization that they brand Value Storage. There are no backups for disaster recovery, but content is replicated between two U-M data centers.
