How to Save Data Storage Costs with Panzura and AWS Intelligent-Tiering

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is an Amazon S3 storage class that analyzes an Amazon Web Service user’s stored data and automatically moves it between storage tiers based on usage frequency. It is designed to optimize storage costs for data with irregular or unknown access patterns. S3 Intelligent-Tiering includes two tiers – frequent access and infrequent access, which is at a lower cost.

For a small monthly monitoring and automation fee per object, S3 Intelligent-Tiering will monitor access patterns and move objects that have not been accessed for 30 consecutive days to the infrequent access tier.

When using Panzura, follow these basic instructions to activate Intelligent-Tiering in AWS.

• Go to the S3 service in the AWS console. Click on the bucket configured with the Panzura filers, then check the box next to the path configured for the Panzura filers.

• Click the “Actions” pull-down menu and select “Change storage class.” 

• This will present you with a window of storage classes. It’s important to not make a mistake here by selecting the wrong storage class, so double check your work. Select the “Intelligent-Tiering” radio button, and finish by clicking the “Save” button. 

• You will be notified that this will change the date modified on objects. 

• You will then see a “Change storage class” progress bar in the lower part of the screen showing you the percentage complete while the change is applied in real-time. 

The amount of time required to complete this step will vary depending on the number of objects in the bucket/path. In testing this process, the experts at Applied Software have found that the change processes about 80K objects per hour.

There are no retrieval fees in S3 Intelligent-Tiering. If an object in the infrequent access tier is accessed later, it is automatically moved back to the frequent access tier. No additional tiering fees apply when objects are moved between access tiers within the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed for 99.9% availability and 99.999999999% durability. It continues to offer the same low latency and high throughput performance of S3 Standard.

If you’re not using Panzura yet for unstructured data management in the cloud, contact Applied Software to find out if it’s right for your workflows. Data generated by machines has a 50x growth rate, so get ahead of the curve. Just a 15-minute discovery call could ease the pain of unstructured data storage now and into the future.