But can you trust it?<p>When I returned to JPL after working at Google for a year I was tasked with evaluating a Google Search Appliance. We ultimately decided not to keep it, and so we had to erase the disks, which now contained sensitive data. The appliance had a "self-destruct" feature that supposedly erased all the data, but there was no way to verify it. After lengthy negotiations with Google (some people just have a hard time grasping the idea that just because a file has been deleted doesn't mean the data is actually gone) we eventually got them to agree to let us open the enclosure and take out the disks. Forensic analysis revealed that they had not in fact been erased.<p>Caveat emptor.
As usual, the pricing is not very friendly, and apparently designed to lock your data into AWS or exploit your weak negotiating position once you buy in.<p>While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03).<p>[assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]
An AWS version of a sneakernet.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet</a>
More details <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...</a>
I'm curious about how they're going to approach this from the fraud perspective. This is a $200 charge for a device that has 50TB storage, which would probably cost you around $2000 to buy.<p>There's people out there that will sign a contract under a fake name / address with a phone provider and sell the phones, and the way the providers fight against it usually by running credit checks and verifying address against them. Ultimately, this is very hard to detect when it involves identity theft.
The math for the time to transfer comparison is interesting:<p>"Even with high-speed Internet connections, it can take months to transfer large amounts of data. For example, 100 terabytes of data will take more than 100 days to transfer over a dedicated 100 Mbps connection. That same transfer can be accomplished in less than one day, plus shipping time, using two Snowball appliances."<p>With a 100 Mbps connection it takes over 100 days [1] but with a 100 times faster connection (10 Gbps) it takes less than a day :)<p>[1] Assuming no network overhead it is 92.6 days
In my last role we would often need to upload large amounts of data for our clients to AWS. When this data got into the terabytes we would ship a NAS box to our customer and then send that to Amazon. On more than one occasion Amazon fubar'ed the upload on their end (why would you move drives around in a RAID 5/6 array?). Maybe since this is AWS branded solution it will be more reliable.
This has interesting security implications for both sides. Is the device 100% offline or does it phone home when you connect it to your network or transmit any other data? What if someone gets the device and hacks it to scan Amazon's networks when sent back?
All the innovation at AWS is amazing. If they every stop charging by the Gigabyte for bandwidth and move to a flat model then I would be tempted to switch to them for all my sites.
> <i></i> Snowball currently supports importing data to AWS. Exporting data out of AWS will be supported in a future release.<p>I'm interested in hearing about how they are going to do this.
Say I wanted to do something similar, but move data around locally between two NAS appliances, but not incur a double disk charge - (i've got a pack of ~ 20 disks in NAS brand a, but i want to move to NAS brand b. The disks work in both, but need reformatting).<p>Does anyone know of a service where I could rent a 20TB device like snowball but not push it to S3?
It's amazing that Amazon has been vertically integrated so many of both its own and external product/services into this appliances:<p>- Kindle's E-Ink<p>- AWS IAM / KMS/ SNS<p>- Amazon Carrier? (perhaps in the future?)<p>- GPS-powered chain-of-custody tracking (AWS working on it, perhaps Amazon Drone delivery in the future?)
When I export data from S3, what do I get for a given bucket? Just basically a file system? How is the metadata stored? What about object versions?<p>I'm curious what the end result looks like in doing this.
<i>the E Ink shipping label will automatically update</i><p>Are you kidding me? Instead of a 25 cent shipping label they use a $100 e-ink display?<p>The display alone might get the device stolen.
Oh amazon please get your naming right. Why does every service have to be named so utterly confusing? I was expected some kind of cloud NLP library. Would have been cool.<p>Out of curiosity, does anyone have a real life example where they send petabytes over the wire? You know, outside the adult industry.
Another easy method to move your customers data to AWS - where I'm sure some three letter agenices feast over each newly arrived platter of data.<p>I'm still waiting for the big leak on how AWS cooperates with NSA at large.
Well, that's an unfortunate name.<p><a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball" rel="nofollow">http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball</a><p>Reminiscent of when Microsoft called an overlay dialog a "floater" and all the South Africans and Brits in the room started laughing.<p><a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater" rel="nofollow">http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater</a>
(the 2nd definition)