Amazon Snowball • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Snowball

#51

Post by utrex » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:15 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #24

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. While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03). [assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]

teraflop was right, it's $200 per snowball device job, which is currently limited to 50TB. Maybe that will change. You can order multiple jobs to import more data. You have 10 days to complete the transfer and ship it back and then it's $15 a day. $200 buys you 50TB per job, great encryption, and speedy migration. Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... and https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/

Re: Amazon Snowball

#52

Post by desdiv » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:16 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #24

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. While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03). [assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]

$1700 is amazingly cheap when you consider that it costs $4300 [0] to transfer that same 50TB out of EC2.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

$4300 = 10000 * $0.09 + 40000 * $0.085

Re: Amazon Snowball

#53

Post by mkobit » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:16 PM UTC

> Snowball currently supports importing data to AWS. Exporting data out of AWS will be supported in a future release.

I'm interested in hearing about how they are going to do this.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#54

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:19 PM UTC

imajes wrote: post #48

toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out. Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.

Don't forget, there's the ongoing storage cost at S3, which also adds up really quickly.

3 cents/GB is cheap. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper.

$10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).

Re: Amazon Snowball

#55

Post by utrex » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:20 PM UTC

rstupek wrote: post #50

x5n1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same service needs to run the other way for the same price. $200 to get all your data shipped to you on an appliance/hard drive.

The service is called AWS Import/Export so it seems you probably can get them to export the data to a snowball for you to get your data.

Right, you can, but you pay for export at $0.03 per GB.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#56

Post by copsarebastards » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

Currently 6 out of 30 links on HN are Amazon links, 4 of them in the top 5. Looks like someone paid for placement.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#57

Post by dx211 » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:23 PM UTC

samf wrote: post #40

ben174 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kept scrolling and looking for a picture of said label, to no avail.

I found an image here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...

Weird - something about the form factor makes me want to violently toss it off a loading dock. Anyone know how much that would translate to in Gs? (The article says it will survive 6 Gs of shock.)

Re: Amazon Snowball

#58

Post by buro9 » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

Well, that's an unfortunate name.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball

Reminiscent of when Microsoft called an overlay dialog a "floater" and all the South Africans and Brits in the room started laughing.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater (the 2nd definition)

Re: Amazon Snowball

#59

Post by devit » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

desdiv wrote: post #52

devit wrote: post #24

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. While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03). [assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]

$1700 is amazingly cheap when you consider that it costs $4300 [0] to transfer that same 50TB out of EC2. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ $4300 = 10000 * $0.09 + 40000 * $0.085

... which is also wildly overpriced.

According to multiple sources, Internet transit in the US now costs less than 1$ for a 1 Mbps line for large deals, which translates to 1$ for 324GB, which translates to 0.003$ / GB.

Amazon charges 15-30 times that.

(it appears that traffic can be much more expensive in places other than the US and presumably Europe)

Re: Amazon Snowball

#60

Post by devy » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

It's amazing that Amazon has been vertically integrated so many of both its own and external product/services into this appliances:

- Kindle's E-Ink

- AWS IAM / KMS/ SNS

- Amazon Carrier? (perhaps in the future?)

- GPS-powered chain-of-custody tracking (AWS working on it, perhaps Amazon Drone delivery in the future?)