Amazon Web Services Inc. late today introduced a new storage tier for its Elastic File System service.

Amazon EFS is a highly scalable storage service for cloud-hosted workloads that was first introduced in 2016. It allows AWS customers to create petabyte-scale file systems that can be accessed by hundreds of thousands of EC2 cloud compute instances and on-premises servers in order to support the applications that run on them.

The new storage tier is called Amazon EFS Infrequent Access, and as the name suggests it provides a cheaper storage option for data that isn’t used very often.

The service is aimed at companies that must meet auditing and data retention requirements, or for those who want to create data backups that can be recovered using normal file operations, Barr said.

To access the service, customers need to enable a new feature in AWS EFS called Lifecycle Management, which will then automatically move old data to the cheaper storage option, according to predefined policies.

“As part of a new Lifecycle Management option for EFS file systems, you can now indicate that you want to move files that have not been accessed in the last 30 days to a storage class that is 85 percent less expensive,” AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post. “Files that have not been read or written for 30 days will be transitioned to the Infrequent Access storage class with no further action on your part.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Amazon EFS Infrequent Access is a welcome addition because in this era where data is the new oil, enterprises can’t always afford to store all of the information they generate. But they may need that data later, even if that need cannot be foreseen today, he said.

“So tiering data is key to provide the right access at the right time, without deleting it,” Mueller said. “Amazon EFS Infrequent Access enables exactly that capability to make sure next generation applications do not lose vital data.”

Amazon EFS Infrequent Access was first announced during AWS re:Invent in November, but now it’s generally available. Pricing starts at at 4.5 cents per gigabyte per month in Amazon’s U.S. East region, with “correspondingly low pricing in other regions,” Barr said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE