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by chucknelson 3482 days ago
I love how this is a literal trailer pulled by a truck - see the pictures at https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/.

I wish they gave more details as to what hardware was in there - are there any pictures of what the trailer looks like on the inside?

3 comments

Couldn't find any pictures of the inside, but techcrunch did get some high resolution photos of the outside, including the chiller connections: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-will-truck-your-mas...
So sneaker net was once someone walking around with burnt CD-ROM, then it was a box of drives, and now its a truck.

Quite a dramatic illustration of the increase in data usage.

If one extrapolates next stop will be a train, and then a container ship full of hard drives.

> then it was a box of drives, and now its a truck.

Between that was FEDEX-ing a NAS. That's pretty much the standard data-exchange format in astronomy, so you have a fast link and don't need to bother plugging a bunch of drives in, just plug the NAS to the power and network and off you go.

Hmmm....

So when will The Universe be too small to data considering data use is exponential.

I imagine there are lower upper limits, but this would be the upper upper limit.

I'm at re:invent and they have a "making of" video next to a demo unit. They only show the physical construction of the power distribution and the raised floor. (Nothing about the racks or what's in them.)

It also appears that you never have access to the inside where the racks are. You can only access the last ~4 feet for power and data connections.