[shortstuffsushi]

Even with that, I don't get it.

"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)?

[extra88]

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.

[mabbo]

Does it seriously take a week to get a snowball? You'd think with all the logistics Amazon owns...

[extra88]

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.

[chrisseaton]

I think they meant a week to request it, receive it, fill it, send it back, upload it to S3.

[brianwawok]

So you have 50TB of images to send me and a 10mbit internet pipe. Is it faster to FTP me the file or mail it on a hard drive?

[shortstuffsushi]

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.

[brianwawok]

Yes they mail you a fancy disk, you fill and mail back.

[tacticus]

it's 428 days to ship 50TB of stuff on a 10Mb/s pipe. 5 days if you have 1Gb/s

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

[notatoad]

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.

[nxzero]

When the last time you moved 10TB+ from onsite to offsite and:

- how long did it take,

- how was latency/connectivity/etc,

- was it encrypted,

- how much did the hardware cost

- etc.