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Comment by dx034 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why this makes sense. Isn't it more useful to get a few hundred snowballs and ship them via Fedex? You can transfer in parallel and should be at the same speed as with Snowmobile. It's at the DC next day and the data will be faster in S3 than by truck. Also, the economies of scale will never pay off for Snowmobile, likely more for Snowball.

At the same time, logistics (incl insurance and security) is handled by companies that are very good at it. Fedex, DHL and the like offer physical security services for goods if you need it in addition to encryption.

Think it's a PR move only. They will probably find a few clients to somehow utilize one truck, but I don't think it's more efficient than Snowballs.

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Installing, powering and cabling "a few hundred" of anything in a datacenter is a big deal. You probably don't have room. You may not have power. You have to deal with hundreds of boxes, cardboard isn't allowed on the datacenter floor (ideally), and just mucking around on the loading dock wrangling stupid stuff like shipping labels is going to suck up a ton of time.

[I'm a C++ dev who likes to help design and build datacenters. It's fun.]

But isn't that the same problem with the truck? You also need to get that connected to the datacenter for a week? I guess as that connection has to leave the building, it should be even harder?

Just run a conduit of fiber out to the parking lot temporarily.

The Snowball ships bare, without packing materials. You receive it, plug it in, transfer data / run code, and ship it.

Still, you're right that there's a logistic issue of physically locating, networking, and powering these devices.

"One Snowmobile can transport up to one hundred petabytes of data in a single trip, the equivalent of using about 1,250 AWS Snowball devices." -- https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

You'd have to find a thousand 1GBe ports in your data center (unless Amazon would ship an expensive switch along with Snowballs) -- that's about two server cages' (10 racks x42U) worth. You will have to find a lot of power -- while Snowmobile can bring a generator.

I doubt there will be a lot of demand for Snowmobiles, though.

If you don't have the ports for Snowballs, you won't have them for Snowmobiles. And instead of copying 1 week, shipping, copying another week back, you can have the first data over after 1 day. This can be crucial to already integrate data before everything's there.

I understand the size of a Snowmobile, but if you don't somehow utilize it exactly 100%, I don't think building your own solution is cheaper than renting logistics as a service from others. Basically AWS in the logistics world.

The advantage with Snowmobile is you only need a dozen or so ports, not hundreds.

Also - think about the person having to do this - If I had to move 100 petabytes of data to AWS - I really don't want to be messing around with hundreds of appliances, tracking them, figuring what we uploaded onto what devices, figuring out how to fragment the data to properly fit on all the devices, etc....

Definitely want to go the Snowmobile route.

I'm not sure that's true -- thinking about our own (small) datacenter, we can find 10 10 gig ports much easier than we could scrounge up 100 1 gbit ports that are in the right place on the network to do a big data transfer like this (i.e. we're not going to open cabinets to plug snowballs into 10 different top of rack switches). Sure we could buy more switches to fan out our spare 10gig ports into 1gig ports, but why bother when AWS has them built-in to the truck?

It seems that any datacenter that's big enough to have a PB of data is going to be able to find 25 40 GBit ports easier than 1000 1Gbit ports.

Even if you only utilize 25% of the Snowmobile, that's 250 individual Snowballs you don't have to handle.

(just bounced this off of one of our network engineers -- if we did have to handle 100 snowballs, we would buy switches, set them up in the big conference room next to the datacenter and run the 10 gig fiber drops over to that conference room where the snowballs would be. He said we're probably looking at $30K in hardware costs to set it up, so the Snowmobile might be cheaper even for 100 snowballs worth of data)

> However, customers with exabyte-scale on-premises storage look at the 80 TB, do the math, and realize that an all-out data migration would still require lots of devices and some headache-inducing logistics.

Lots of devices certainly. But headache-inducing logistics? I think getting snowballs via Fedex/DHL, copying them and sending them back is easier than figuring out how to connect the truck to your in-house datacentre. Most won't have a spare 1Tbit/s connection in the parking lot.

If you're looking to transfer 100s of petabytes, I imagine you'd find a way to get a 1Tbps connection to the parking lot, rather than connect and disconnect thousands of Snowballs. It's clearly intended for a different use case than transferring a few petabytes.

> Isn't it more useful to get a few hundred snowballs and ship them via Fedex?

Corporate types, spending loads of company money, are more interested in convenience and turn key solutions to problems that rigs that cost less but give more to think about or other issues.

I'd wager this is already basically a trailer full of racked snowballs, perhaps without the ruggedized enclosures.

Atomic transaction FTW.

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