I'm with Atlantic.net cloud [AWS competitor, full disclosure]; the price point for storage is great but retrieval seems expensive -- perhaps retrieval is very rare its offset by the savings on the storage. I know you can mail in drives for storage, can you have them mail you drives for retrieval? (for Glacier specifically)
Also, prior comments made mention they were using some sort of robotic tape devices, but according to this blog:
I don't think they're loss-leadering on storage, but if they are, they don't think they will be for long. AWS (EC2 and S3 in particular) does very well when it comes to profit margins. I suspect they'd like to keep it that way, and that whatever they're charging gives them some slice of profit, however small.
Also, prior comments made mention they were using some sort of robotic tape devices, but according to this blog:
http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage-h...
Its using "commodity hardware components". So, thats why I thought maybe they are loss-leadering on the storage and making up on the retrieval prices?
Its definately a interesting product and I love how there's a reason they called it Glacier. AMZN is a wild boar going after everyone!