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Data Storage Media

Amazon To Offer Sneakernet Services: Data Upload By Mail 94

Posted by timothy from the those-are-some-big-sneakers dept.
blueshift_1 writes: If you have 50TB of data that you'd like to put on the S3 cloud, Amazon is releasing Snowball. It's basically a large grey box full of hard drives that Amazon will mail to you. Simply upload your files and mail it back — they will upload it for you. For $200 + shipping, it's at a pretty reasonable price point if you're tired of hosting your data and want to try and push that to AWS. ("Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -Tanenbaum, Andrew S.)
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Amazon To Offer Sneakernet Services: Data Upload By Mail More

Amazon To Offer Sneakernet Services: Data Upload By Mail

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  • It's been available for a while (Score:4, Informative)

    by Pete (big-pete) ( 253496 ) * <peter_endean@hotmail.com> on Friday October 09, 2015 @02:45AM (#50691513)

    It's nice they've got an official box and all, but the service to send disks to Amazon has been there for a while (as a beta program).

    Here is a blog post from 2009 explaining the service. [amazon.com]

    Of course, a nice official controlled and encrytped box is a far tidier way of doing things!

    -- Pete.

    • send disks to Amazon

      Oh, and those disks make a detour to the NSA on their way to Amazon. Very convenient, indeed.

      • Re:It's been available for a while (Score:4, Funny)

        by willworkforbeer ( 924558 ) on Friday October 09, 2015 @07:50AM (#50692161)

        Oh, and those disks make a detour to the NSA on their way to Amazon. Very convenient, indeed.

        It was the shipping via Black Helicopter Express that gave it away.

      • Re:It's been available for a while (Score:4, Interesting)

        by danceswithtrees ( 968154 ) on Friday October 09, 2015 @12:08PM (#50693667)

        Even without the detour, what are the security ramifications of connecting a foreign device to your network? Its from Amazon, they have an image to protect, but what if they get hacked or the packaged gets switched/tampered with en route? The device can silently start making its way around your network collecting data you didn't want to upload.

        I'll take off my aluminum Faraday beanie cap now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hawguy ( 1600213 )

          Even without the detour, what are the security ramifications of connecting a foreign device to your network? Its from Amazon, they have an image to protect, but what if they get hacked or the packaged gets switched/tampered with en route? The device can silently start making its way around your network collecting data you didn't want to upload.

          I'll take off my aluminum Faraday beanie cap now.

          If you plug a foreign device into a port that has unfettered access to your network, you'll get what you deserve.

        • And then there is the opposite problem. This could make an excellent entry vector to Amazon's cloud service that may not be as protected as 'normal' uploading via the Internet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawguy ( 1600213 )

        send disks to Amazon

        Oh, and those disks make a detour to the NSA on their way to Amazon. Very convenient, indeed.

        Why bother slurping data off discrete disks in transit when the NSA can just access the data when it's on AWS's servers?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        --This. If I were shipping Terabytes of valuable company data, I think it should rather be PHYSICALLY COURIERED to the destination by at least two people that are highly paid AND trustable (and maybe continuously filmed and stopping points logged, as well.)

        --I absolutely do not understand why anyone would throw ~50TB of data in the back of a UPS or Fedex truck and trust blindly that things would somehow end up going well.

  • A perfect example of why tech is cyclical.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Drakonblayde ( 871676 ) on Friday October 09, 2015 @03:21AM (#50691593)

    In the beginning, networking was developed so that folks wouldn't have to shuttle data back and forth via locomotion.

    Now, we have so much data and fast bandwidth is so expensive, that transferring data to another site physically is actually a consideration.

    • Now, we have so much data and fast bandwidth is so expensive, that transferring data to another site physically is actually a consideration.

      Was there ever a time this wasn't true?

      • No matter how much bandwidth there is, people will always want to move more data than there is bandwidth.

        To use the time-honoured car analogy, no matter how many roads the government builds, there will always be enough cars to jam them up.
      • For sufficiently latency-insensitive operations I don't think that it has every really gone away; but my impression(based on hazy memory and anecdote, though I'd welcome anyone with actual numbers) is that, unless you live in an atypically favored location, the delta between the storage you can afford and what the ISP will sell you, much less at a price you can stomach, has actually increased over time, thanks to HDDs massively upping their game while ISPs have improved; but rather more slowly(especially on

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          My ISP has been stagnant for years while hard drives just keep getting bigger and bigger. This is especially true for uploads.

          I think my ISP increased upload speeds once in ten years.

          • This. I've had 15/2 for almost 7 years. They *just* started offering 50/5 here it's getting installed today. With about 20 devices (iDevices for kids, laptops, TVs, FireTVs, GoogleTVs, etc.), it's about time. On the business side that same 15/2 used to cost $60/mp. Now it costs $299/mo. I think Time Warner Cable Business Class is trying to fatten up their bottom line before the Charter deal goes through.
            • oh my... i'm starting to feel guilty complaining about my 75/75 for $60 a month. looks like i'm getting a good deal.
              • Wow, 75/75. What area are you in? I want to move! To be clear in case others wonder the $299/mo is if I was to "renew" my 15/2 business class service. For the 50/5 residential service it's about $50/mo.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jabuzz ( 182671 )

            In the last ten years I have gone from 512/128kbps to 40/20Mbps, and with the application of a bit more cash I could go to 80/20Mbps tomorrow (or more likely at the start of the next month billing cycle in about weeks time). However I don't really feel the need for the extra download speed at the moment.

            According to my maths that is roughly an 80 times improvement in a decade. Wind the clock back another couple of years and I was on dial up at 56/33 kbps so another order of magnitude improvement.

            In that tim

      • Now, we have so much data and fast bandwidth is so expensive, that transferring data to another site physically is actually a consideration.

        Was there ever a time this wasn't true?

        Sure there was. I remember a time when having physical media was a big deal. One, because storage was still an issue, Two because downloading crap took a long time. It you had physical media, it was faster to install from CD than to download and run an executable. Then storage caught up, and bandwidth increased. To the point where I haven't actually used physical media in quite a long time. Need to install an ISO? Flash a thumb drive and boot. I'm actually pretty happy I don't have stacks of game boxes I ne

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by cdrudge ( 68377 )

          To the point where I haven't actually used physical media in quite a long time. Need to install an ISO? Flash a thumb drive and boot.

          So you haven't used physical media, but you used physical media (a flash drive) to install software onto another physical media (presumably a hard/solid state drive).

          You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            I think Drakonblayde meant "I haven't actually used physical media that I did not record myself in quite a long time."

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pnutjam ( 523990 )
          So it takes a year to upload... The sooner you start, the sooner it's done. Then you just have to rsync the changes.

      • Was there ever a time this wasn't true?

        Maybe five to ten years ago or so. I think that bandwidth shot up around then, which left us with a brief respite before people started demanding more data with the more bandwidth that they then had. At least, that's the way it seems to me. I was pretty happy with my bandwidth around then. I know that bandwidth has gone up since then, but that the demand for content has gone up more.

        That's just my perception, though. YMMV.

        At the same time, it seems like some things don't move or don't move much. Video

    • "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

      That's from Andrew Tannenbaum, one of the main authors of Minix, the direct ancestor of UNIX, in his book on computer networks. It was a _very_ good book, and I recommend its latest edition to my younger colleagues today. It was first printed in 1981, and I certainly remember occassionally using that kind of solution in the 1980's myself. And physical media transport is still a useful solution today: the external

      • MINIX is not an ancestor of UNIX. It is a pedagogical UNIX workalike originally included as a toy OS that accompanied Tanenbaum's Operating Systems textbook.

        Historically it is a predecessor of Linux, because Linus Torcalds was a minix user who was unsatisfied with it, so began making his own OS. It made perfect sense for minix not to "innovate" btw, because it was a pedagogical tool, never intended to be the broad sort of thing that Linux has grown to be.

        UNIX is (obviously) much older than minix or Linux.

        • Thank you very much for the correction. I confused "Minix" with "Multics", which is a UNIX ancestor and which I used a very long time ago in my career.

      • That's odd. I always thought the quote was from the book "The Eudaemonic Pie" (the true story of the MIT group beating the casinos at roulette), in which there actually was a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. I suppose the author could have just reused the quote, but it seems like a pretty big coincidence.
    • I got computer time to process a 200MB dataset. But the internet bandwidth was still measured in kilobaud then. So we loaded up a disk and flew to the computer. Multiply everything by a million 20 years later.

  • And when you want to move your data out? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by innocent_white_lamb ( 151825 ) on Friday October 09, 2015 @03:36AM (#50691625)

    Do they load the box and send it back to you when you're moving to another service or returning to self-hosting?

    • Re:And when you want to move your data out? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Drakonblayde ( 871676 ) on Friday October 09, 2015 @03:49AM (#50691667)

      Yeah, it's 200 bucks + 3 cents a gig if you want them to ship the data to you, which isn't terribly unreasonable

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        Sure it is. You just have to add everything up and include all of the small bits that eventually add up to a level of TCO and performance that isn't terribly compelling.

  • Not gonna happen (Score:5, Funny)

    by garryknight ( 1190179 ) <garryknight@@@gmail...com> on Friday October 09, 2015 @06:45AM (#50692043)
    If you have 50TB of data that you'd like to put on the S3 cloud, Amazon is releasing Snowball.

    I don't, therefore it isn't.

  • The name (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Snowball"? That is juvenile and utterly disgusting.

    • well... we know what YOU'VE been watching. I suspect there's a perfectly innocuous explanation for the name however.
  • What's this station wagon you talk about?

  • I can't wait for the price on this to come down. I did the calculation and to backup our DAS it will be almost $600, not to mention the cost of hosting it from that point forward in S3. The Kindle as a shipping label elicited a hearty guffaw, however.

  • The future is here! (Score:3)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Friday October 09, 2015 @05:21PM (#50695917)
    I just had Amazon sneakernet some movies to me. Instead of suffer that tedious streaming download I had them put the data on optical disks and mail them to me. When they get here I'll rip them to my hard drive and be all set! That's customer service you just can't get from Hulu. I expect this sort of download to really take off over the next few years.

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