Amazon Project Snowball - discuss!

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pburrows145
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Amazon Project Snowball - discuss!

Post by pburrows145 »

http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/07/amazon-snowball/

It seems paradoxical that you'd have to ship cloud data, but plenty of companies do -- it's sometimes faster for them to send a courier than to wait days for a massive upload to finish. And Amazon knows it. The internet giant just revealed the Snowball, an odd but unassuming storage device that shuttles up to 50TB of data to Amazon Web Services the old-fashioned way. The box is not only tough enough to survive the bumps and jostles of a courier, but has everything it needs for power and networking. There's even an E Ink control panel on the side that doubles as an automatic shipping label.

You probably aren't going to use Snowball unless you're with a company that uses AWS, and it'll probably be a big company at that. That's doubly true when it'll cost $200 plus shipping every time you want to move terabytes of data across the country. You might notice its impact even if you never see it in person, though. You may spend less time waiting for your favorite cloud service to roll out updates, recover from outages and otherwise keep itself in top shape.
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Re: Amazon Project Snowball - discuss!

Post by sooperdooper »

Very interesting article. I can see this being utilized in our industry.
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Re: Amazon Project Snowball - discuss!

Post by dtmcnamara »

pburrows145 wrote:You probably aren't going to use Snowball unless you're with a company that uses AWS, and it'll probably be a big company at that. That's doubly true when it'll cost $200 plus shipping every time you want to move terabytes of data across the country.[/i]
$200 seems like a very small number to do this....especially with a max of up to 50TB of data. I wonder if there will be a SLA that guarantees no corruption of data? Last thing I would want to do is backup that much data and have to do it over again because something went wrong.

Also speaking of backing up to it....I wonder what type of connections it will have? I would hope for some type of SFP+ so you could do a 10G connection.
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Re: Amazon Project Snowball - discuss!

Post by jedfrechette »

The original Amazon blog post has more details:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-im ... ppliances/

It certainly is looks a lot simpler than crating up and unpacking random RAID arrays, not that I'll be coming even close to sending this much data to our S3 buckets for a very long time.
Jed
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