211–220 of 221 posts
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This almost got me and then I looked at the date of publication.
It's still true. A pigeon can easily carry 10 microSD cards, 1TB each. Even if you're on a gigabit connection, it will take you over 22 hours to copy 10TB.
Oh, fun! When a good Chinese manufacturer duplicates the form factor, someone can ship clones of these laden with malware for spear-phishing attacks on corporate, industrial, and classified networks. > I connect the Snowcone to the power supply and to my network, and power up! After a few seconds of initialization, the device shows its IP address and invites me to connect: With a convincing e-Ink display, and an unus…
If this was swapped in shipping it could potentially just work as expected while exfiltrating data whenever it could connect to the internet, potentially through builtin lte, etc.
Oh, fun! When a good Chinese manufacturer duplicates the form factor, someone can ship clones of these laden with malware for spear-phishing attacks on corporate, industrial, and classified networks. > I connect the Snowcone to the power supply and to my network, and power up! After a few seconds of initialization, the device shows its IP address and invites me to connect: With a convincing e-Ink display, and an unus…
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Just FYI your company has a cert mismatch on the following link from that blog post: https://platform.digitalglobe.com/gbdx/ The cert is limited to *.wpengine.com And the link 404s so.. that's a shame. Was interested in learning more about the platform.
Like everything from DigitalGlobe -- it doesn't work.
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I can speak to part of the rationality around Snowball: The old method of customers sending in hard disks and AWS importing them turned out to be _incredibly_ high touch. * Customers would put the wrong labels on the wrong drives. Given they were encrypted, and the label details were critical to matching the right disk with the right encryption key, that was a big issue. * Imports would routinely fail due to all sort…
Doesn't solve * Drives would get damaged during shipping. * Stuff would go missing in shipping.
Stuff going missing in shipping is solved by very low powered tracking chips in them. AWS knows where those devices are and could tell shipping firms if needs be.
It is an awesome box and an awesome solution to a real life problem. I really wanted to love snowball.
I was not filling them all the way up by any means, so the turnaround had to be fast enough for me to justify it over just uploading to s3 over slowish connections.
The interface in the console was very opaque and gave no information about when the boxes would get shipped out.
I had weeks long delays with zero contact when the box types I wanted were out of stock and only found out that was the cause when I cried to support.
I also had boxes stall at the import stage after they had already been shipped back.
The software to transfer was also just ok.
I think with more love this can be a great tool, but there are some things that could make it better.
Here is what I don't get about this product line. The docs say the encryption is done on the attached workstation. Which means your network transfer speed is going to be limited if you don't have a pretty high end machine with at least AESNI. What is the point of having the processor and all that in the device itself if you end up needing a high end workstation anyways to get the maximum performance out of the thing?
It’s a trade off between speed and security, and my assumption is that they’ve chosen to do it this way so that the encryption key isn’t sitting on the device during transit. By doing it this way even if someone can intercept data while it’s being shipped between the customer and AWS all they’re going to get is a disk full of random bytes.
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You need to account data transfer OUT if you need to get your data from S3. _If_ you could download 100PB data, it'd cost you $1M.
Hopefully it is not stored as one giant object and hopefully your retrieval would be only specific parts (small parts.)
When I was using glacier, we treated it sort of like a write only storage, with the understanding that if we ever needed data out, we’d have to think long and hard about the data’s value, and probably would have gotten an AWS rep on the line to make sure we didn’t do anything stupid.
I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point. It seems like a way to sync local big data to AWS cloud storage for data that is too large to realistically transfer via the internet. So is this simply a sneakernet external harddrive because physically shipp…
I'm with you. I think this is really cool but I have a hard time finding a use case for it. The use case for the other Snow products (Snowball, Snowmobile) are clearer, as they are for transferring petabytes of data to/from AWS without having to use slow internet connections. Snowcone could be used for this indeed, but at only 8 TB, the value proposition seems a lot less. Personally, I'd probably just suffer through…
For them Snowcone is perfect as it's much cheaper than Snowball and does the job of trickling data back home.