"What's a Snowball?"
Animated YouTube by Amazon explains: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9uc2DSZ1wL8
Animated YouTube by Amazon explains: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9uc2DSZ1wL8
"Moving lots of data either requires a huge pipe, or a ton of storage disks."
With that, they offer their Snowball device, which, if I'm understanding correctly, holds up to 50TB (now 80TB), which they physically ship to you, and then you ship back to them. How does this fix either of the constraints (disk space / connection pipe)?
- how long did it take,
- how was latency/connectivity/etc,
- was it encrypted,
- how much did the hardware cost
- etc.
This assumes you get perfect utilisation of the connection (which never happens) so i would probably round up to 450 to 500 days on a 10Mb/s pipe
If you can spare a 1 gigabit connection to saturate with S3 uploads, you can send 50TB in about two weeks. It takes about a week to request a Snowball, have it arrive, you fill it (takes about a day, assuming you have a 10Gbit connection for Snowball), you ship it back, they copy the contents to AWS storage. If you don't have a spare 1 gigabit connection, the speed is that much better. Even if you don't have 10Gbit hardware to fill Snowball with, a local, dedicated 1 gigabit connection to Snowball would be much more reliable.