Case Study: Amazon.com achieves up to 12X faster restores, reduced capital costs, and elimination of tape backups with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon.com - Customer Case Study

Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, was struggling with legacy tape backups as its number and size of Oracle databases grew. Tape-based processes required complex capacity planning, significant capital and software expenses, specialized staff, slow and failure-prone restores, and operational overhead that hindered scaling and timely recovery.

Amazon migrated Oracle RMAN backups to Amazon S3 using the Oracle Secure Backup Cloud module, a one‑time configuration per database, and retired tape infrastructure and backup software. The move eliminated capex and tape logistics, freed engineering resources, improved durability and availability (S3’s 11‑nines durability), and dramatically sped recovery—restores were two to twelve times faster (a 3.8 TB restore took 2.5 hours versus ~10–15 hours on tape)—while shifting costs to pay‑as‑you‑use cloud storage.

Amazon.com