AWS shows off juggernaut that can store - and transport - 100PB of data
Unit will help speed-up multi-petabyte data migrations, claims Amazon
Amazon Web Service (AWS) has shown off its latest data storage innovation - a huge truck that will let customers physically move their data to the Amazon cloud.
AWS's chief evangelist Jeff Barr announced the truck, called Snowmobile, in a blog post, where he explained that for customers with huge data estates, this could be the solution to their woes.
"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," he said.
As such, AWS has designed the Snowmobile to be able to handle a whopping 100 petabytes of data.
"This secure data truck stores up to 100 PB of data and can help you to move exabytes to AWS in a matter of weeks (you can get more than one if necessary)," he said.
Amazon's initiative comes just a week after a panellist at Computing's IT Leaders Forum admitted that, for migrating petabytes of data from one cloud provider to another, nothing beats a van or lorry.
Amazon's vehicle comes mounted with a ruggedised, tamper-resistant shipping container that is 45 feet long, 9.6 feet high, and eight feet wide to house the storage unit.
It was unveiled on stage at AWS's annual conference in Las Vegas, as the below video shows (be warned it's quite loud).
It is also water-proof, climate-controlled and consumes about 350 kW of AC power while it is being used to ingest the data from a customer's storage facility. Barr also touted the security features as suitable for any organisation's needs.
"Snowmobile incorporates multiple layers of logical and physical protection including chain-of-custody tracking and video surveillance. Your data is encrypted with your AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys before it is written," he said.
"Each container includes GPS tracking, with cellular or satellite connectivity back to AWS. We will arrange for a security vehicle escort when the Snowmobile is in transit; we can also arrange for dedicated security guards while your Snowmobile is on-premises."
Barr said that the Snowmobile comes equipped with a high-speed switch capable of supporting 1 Tb/second of data transfer spread across multiple 40 Gb/second connections, meaning that if a customer's network can handle these speeds it should fill the unit in about 10 days.
Barr demonstrated how all this works in practice by using Lego models which we suggest you check out.