"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)?
With Snowball, you don't need a huge pipe because your data is being sneaker-netted to one of their data centers. You don't need a ton of storage disks because they're lending Snowball to you in the short-term as a means of copying your data to S3 (and/or Glacier) for the long-term.
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.
A week to go from requesting a Snowball to having your data in the cloud. For example, place the request Monday morning, receive it Wednesday afternoon, immediately get started filling it, ship it back Thursday afternoon, they receive it on Saturday, hook it up, your data is in your AWS storage by the end of the day Sunday.
To you and @nxzero, I'm not debating whether it's better or worse, I'm trying to find out if I'm actually understanding it right. From some of the other comments, it appears that it is just a matter of them sending you a physical disk -- it makes sense now.
it doesn't fix the constraint about needing a ton of disks, but it solves it for you - they're loaning you a big pile of disk space to use for the transfer.
"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)?