How Do You Get All of Your Data into Amazon’s Cloud, By Truck of Course!

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy just announced a new service called AWS Snowmobile, which is a 21st century version of the classic “sneakernet” method of data transport.

Basically, Amazon is offering to tow a 45-foot-long shipping container full of hard drives to your data center, plug in to your servers via fiber, and siphon off up to 100 petabytes (a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes) of data.

That shipping container is then transported to an Amazon data center where all the data is uploaded to S3 or Amazon Glacier, Amazon's cloud data storage services.

After an initial assessment, a Snowmobile will be transported to your data center and AWS personnel will configure it for you so it can be accessed as a network storage target.

When your Snowmobile is on site, AWS personnel will work with your team to connect a removable, high-speed network switch from Snowmobile to your local network and you can begin your high-speed data transfer from any number of sources within your data center to the Snowmobile.

After your data is loaded, Snowmobile is driven back to AWS where your data is imported into Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier.

Snowmobile uses multiple layers of security designed to protect your data including dedicated security personnel, GPS tracking, alarm monitoring, 24/7 video surveillance, and an optional escort security vehicle while in transit.

All data is encrypted with 256-bit encryption keys managed through the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and designed to ensure both security and full chain-of-custody of your data.

Last year, Amazon announced a solution it called Snowball, a handheld box about the size of a desktop PC. A company rents it from Amazon, stuffs it with a petabyte of data, and ships it back to Amazon to unload. A petabyte is 1 million gigabytes, and it used to be considered an insane amount of data. In this way, a company could transfer a petabyte per week into Amazon's cloud and eventually unplug its data center altogether if it wanted to.

Jassy didn't think the Snowball would be much of a hit. He even “chastised” the Snowball team on stage for manufacturing too many of them.

But he was wrong - big time. The team had to almost instantly “go back and order 10 times the number of Snowballs we have,” Jassy said. “I can't believe how much data we've transferred with Snowball.”

Read: Matson opts for advanced AWS cloud platform

It became such a big thing that IT folks started talking selfies with their Snowballs and sending them to Amazon.

These days, there are companies that store so much more data they measure it in exabytes. An exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.

Using conventional means of transferring that data, “it will take you 26 years to move an exabyte to the cloud,” Jassy said.

Enter the Snowmobile. “With 10 Snowmobiles, it takes six months” to move that data to the cloud, Jassy said.

So for a company sitting on a mind-boggling amount of data, Amazon will drive a Snowmobile to its data center, load it up, and haul to back to Amazon.

As for the popular Snowball, Amazon has upgraded it with more capacity and computing power because people have come up with all kinds of innovative things they want to do with it besides use it to ship data to AWS.

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