"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Amazon Snowball
61–70 of 202 posts
Re: Amazon Snowball
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it'll be a 10GbE interface?
Ethernet is most ubiquitous. You don't need physical access to a server with data, just network access. Most environments outside of datacenters don't have 10GbE switches or NICs yet. EDIT: It appears it supports 10GbE natively. I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.
> I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.
Yeah, ethernet has pretty much always downgraded well. That's why a 10GBASE-T interface is perfect :P
(I should have been more clear with my initialisms)
Re: Amazon Snowball
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host and stored on the appliance in encrypted form", key is stored in KMS, according to https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
I think the poster was talking about someone simply gutting the appliance for the 50TB drives. With a bit of fraud here and there on top.
From the looks of it the delivery provider is UPS, if they lose it or a rogue employee guts it during transit, I think AWS will probably have clauses in their contracts to go at them full pelt with a lawsuit
Re: Amazon Snowball
#64Well, 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)
[deleted]
Re: Amazon Snowball
#65The math for the time to transfer comparison is interesting:
"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."
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 :)
[1] Assuming no network overhead it is 92.6 days
Re: Amazon Snowball
#66Earlier 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.
If it is cold storage, you could use AWS Glacier (https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/) which is way cheaper than S3.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#67Re: Amazon Snowball
#68An AWS version of a sneakernet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
"Sneakernet" is an amusing term to me, because prior to the advent of widespread, high-speed Internet access, this was the only way to transfer large amounts of data.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#69safer than google option of asking you to ship the un-encrypted drive.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#70As 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/impo…
After reading those pages, I think you're wrong, and the $200 is actually per-device.
For one thing, the documentation says you can use multiple Snowball devices, but carefully tiptoes around saying whether or not there's an extra charge for doing so. All of the language that actually talks about pricing just says "the device", singular. For another thing, the screenshots of the "create a job" workflow are missing any way to specify that you want multiple devices. It sure looks like one job == one device.
(This reminds me of the pricing issues around AWS's Glacier service. It's not even that the pricing model itself is bad -- it's that the marketing is obfuscatory to the point of being arguably deceptive.)