AWS Snowmobile Roars In To Truck Exabytes Of Data To Cloud
Amazon.com has used its reInvent event here to introduce the remarkable AWS Snowball – enormous trucks loaded with gear that can store up to 100 petabytes of data and move it safely to a datacentre.
As Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services, puts it: “Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be. Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades.”
Each Snowmobile includes a network cable connected to a high-speed switch capable of supporting 1 Tb/second of data transfer spread across multiple 40 Gb/second connections. “Assuming that your existing network can transfer data at that rate, you can fill a Snowmobile in about 10 days,” Jeff Barr says.
Among many other services introduced at reInvent is Amazon Shield, a new security tool for cloud customers. CTO Werner Vogels unveiled the shield, which offers layers of protection designed to protect against service interruptions like the cyber attack that took down top Web sites in October.
“This will really help you protect yourselves even against the largest and most sophisticated attacks we’ve seen,” Vogel said.