Support for AWS S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval (GIR)

Starting in Hammerspace 5.3, administrators can designate an Object Storage Volume (OSV) as AWS S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval (GIR) class. GIR is an AWS archive storage tier that costs roughly 5.75 times less per GB per month than S3 Standard, while still providing millisecond read latency — unlike deeper archive tiers such as Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Glacier Deep Archive, which require hours of restore time before data is accessible.

GIR enables organizations to significantly reduce cloud storage spend on data that must be retained for compliance, reference, or archival purposes — data that must be immediately accessible upon request but is rarely or never part of active workflows.

Storage system support: Amazon S3 is the only object storage type that supports GIR in this release. The --storage-class CLI parameter and the Archive Type field in the GUI are not available for Azure, GCP, or Hammerspace S3 storage nodes.

This section includes the following subsections: