Amazon Web Services (AWS) are looking to introduce a new online storage system named ‘Glacier’.

The new storage service would offer cheap storage, from $0.01 per gigabyte a month. The service has been designed for archival data, aimed at data that would not have to be accessed rapidly, with expectations of retrieval being in the hours rather than minutes.

The service is designed to replace tape archives as a backup technology, with Amazon describing “older tape libraries are less efficient and therefore costlier to operate”.