Amazon To Offer Sneakernet Services: Data Upload By Mail 94
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.)
It's been available for a while (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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)
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.
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Re:It's been available for a while (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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--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.
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Encrypt it?
Why would you store valuable data in plain text on a cloud service?
Re:Theft waiting to happen (Score:5, Informative)
The boxes in which these hard drives ship will be obvious that they're from Amazon. It's an invitation to thieves to steal the boxes and the data on the hard drives. I can't understand why ANYONE would ship data of any value in this manner.
The data is encrypted by the tool that copies data to the device. It doesn't seem like it would take too many thefts before UPS/FedEx roots out their thieving employees.
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The boxes in which these hard drives ship will be obvious that they're from Amazon. It's an invitation to thieves to steal the boxes and the data on the hard drives. I can't understand why ANYONE would ship data of any value in this manner.
It's not like their shipping you bare OEM drives with some air puffs. The box is a self contained appliance. I'd be very surprised if the copy to the drives in the box didn't leave the data encrypted, it'd be foolish of Amazon to do it any other way
Re:Theft waiting to happen (Score:4, Informative)
And yes, excerpted directly from the service web page found at https://aws.amazon.com/importe... [amazon.com]
'Once it arrives, attach the appliance to your local network, download and run the Snowball client to establish a connection, and then use the client to select the file directories that you want to transfer to the appliance. The client will then encrypt and transfer the files to the appliance at high speed.'
So unless the client is absolute crap, it's a pretty good solution
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download and run the Snowball client. Has anybody done this ? I suspect that it is a MS Windows executable, does it run under Wine ?
Re:Theft waiting to happen (Score:5, Informative)
There are versions for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Amazon supports the Snowball Client for Ubuntu 12+ and RHEL 6+, but no doubt it can run on other systems. https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/tools/ [amazon.com]
Also, as per this link [amazon.com], they're working on chain-of-custody tracking using GPS. Amazon has already considered the possibility of theft and it doesn't seem likely to be an issue.
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I can't wait for a Synology plugin app that supports this. I'd much rather have my NAS push the data to the snowball than have it traverse the network twice.
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The presence of backdoor keys for NSA warrant free decryption seems a given. But that would seem to be a given for all major cloud storage services, so it may not even be needed for the Snowball device itself. And there are quite a few situations where local bandwidth costs or data center replication would justify transferring this material to Amazon: their AWS S3 storage has proven far more reliable, and scalable, than many local storage solutions.
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Anyone see this as a way to infiltrate a network?
I mean, the only way to get data into and out of it is a 10gE connection, to which you n
Re:Theft waiting to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't understand [...]
And that should be your cue not to post, and think for a moment. If you have sensitive data, you use encryption.
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The shipping companies deal with thousands of Amazon boxes a day and they all pretty much look alike. The box they ship it in is probably going to be less decorated than their usual boxes. The only way the driver knows it is special is that it is addressed to a business and he throws his back out picking the damn thing up (come on, at 50TB that is still a good number of harddrives + appliance). But considering that you can get drives in bulk shipped, it will be just another day on the job.
Business is the
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A perfect example of why tech is cyclical.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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?
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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.
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No matter how much bandwidth there is, people will always want to move more data than there is bandwidth.
Third law of data transfer dynamics?
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Has anyone else succeeded with this?
Re:A perfect example of why tech is cyclical.... (Score:5, Funny)
At the opposite end of the scale, I have been unable to persuade any of my pigeons to take off with an LTO tape attached to their legs.
Has anyone else succeeded with this?
Try disguising it as a coconut. Works better with swallows, however.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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I think Drakonblayde meant "I haven't actually used physical media that I did not record myself in quite a long time."
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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
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"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
Re: A perfect example of why tech is cyclical.... (Score:1)
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.
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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.
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I did this in 1990s (Score:2)
And when you want to move your data out? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Yeah, it's 200 bucks + 3 cents a gig if you want them to ship the data to you, which isn't terribly unreasonable
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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.
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can't you download it for free? and just cancel?
upload may suck, but download is pretty fine for even the average citizen.
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Yes, it's a lock in service. Pretty much nobody factored *that* into their "AWS is cheap" equation. Best part is there's no way out... you either pay the pay-as-you-go fee for the data, or you bite the bullet and pay the huge lump sum to get data out. There's no leaving it sit on a shelf gathering dust option.
That may prompt more companies to start erasing old data though...
If $1700 to export 50TB of data is too expensive for you, is that 50TB of data really all that valuable to you? It'll cost you $350/month just to keep it in Glacier, and you'd be hard pressed to store it yourself (with the same level of durability) for less than that.
Not gonna happen (Score:5, Funny)
I don't, therefore it isn't.
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Tech sites review plenty of flops.
Re: Not gonna happen (Score:1)
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did you seriously just call copying files to a hard drive 'upload'? *facepalm*
No, he called copying files to a NAS an "upload" - plug it in an upload your files to the device, seems like a reasonable use of the term. What do you call it?
The name (Score:1)
"Snowball"? That is juvenile and utterly disgusting.
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Station Wagon (Score:2)
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I suspect after the first couple of people do that, it will become $200 + $5000 deposit to be credited to your AWS account when they get the thing back.
Can't wait (Score:2)
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)