A month after launching a homegrown alternative to AWS Lambda, Microsoft Corp. is repeating the gambit in the storage arena with the introduction of a new archiving service for safekeeping infrequently-used records. It’s being offered at a similarly low rate as Amazon Inc.’s competing Glacier store and targets many of the same use cases, but sets itself apart on performance.

Whereas Amazon keeps archived data on a low-cost medium that can take anywhere between three and five hours to fulfill an access request, Redmond’s Cool Blob Storage matches the speed of its object service. The offerings also share the same programming interface, which makes it relatively straightforward for developers to take advantage of the new functionality in their applications. A cloud-based backup system, for instance, could now keep a company’s multimedia content in Microsoft’s object store and send activity logs that are only needed occasionally to the archive for cost saving purposes.

The catch is that Cool Blob Storage’s model is geared towards information that is accessed less than once a month.  That may be fine when it comes to audit records that are only pulled up during the occasional corporate review, but the same is not necessarily true for other use cases like historical analytics. As a result, Microsoft will only be able to target a subset of the organizations that are currently storing their cold data in AWS Glacier, albeit much more convincingly than other contenders thanks to its superior performance.

And as The Register points out, there’s no reason why Redmond couldn’t eventually introduce a storage option that similarly allows unlimited access attempts at the cost of slower data retrieval times. That’s the approach Google has taken with its own Glacier competitor, Nearline, which was announced earlier this year.

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