There's a courier here says he's got 50TB of cloud data for you Amazon Web Services has announced it will happily delivery 50TB of cloud data to your doorstep. The data will arrive wrapped in a Snowball, the rugged 50TB array the company revealed last year as a way to import data to its cloudy storage services. Amazon's idea with Snowball is that lots of people want to adopt cloud storage …
"If my sums are right, it's way less than 100MB/sec" -- Adam52
A Snowball weighs about 23kg and could easily be checked as hold baggage on a plane. It would take a few hours to extract its 50TB over its 10Gb/s port. So by speeding up the shipping a bit you can probably get it anywhere it could be useful within a day, giving you about 600MB/s equivalent making it well over 100x faster than a T3 line.
Executed expeditiously, moving physical storage is faster than networking: always has been, and I think always will be. The Snowball is heavy (ruggedness & self contained PSU, etc) and is only about 2TB/kg, whereas plain old SSDs are > 10x the data per mass. A 747 full of SSDs travelling LON->NYC is probably a Snowball per second.
I thought a 747 was an El Reg measurement of length, and olympic swimming pools a measurement of volume...
An olympic pool is 2500m3,
A 747-400F is 607.7m3 of transport space and is 70.6 metres long.
LON->NY: 5576 km and 6 hours
So rounding things off in proper terms that everyone can easily understand is that 1 Snowball per second is 1/4 an olympic swimming pool of SSD's transported in 6 hours over of a length of 79000 Boeing 747's.
No?
Beat me to it :)
If you've got 50 terabytes to shift, it's almost certainly quicker to put the disks in a van than try to do it over the interwebs. Especially when someone turns something vital off at 95% done :)
You do run the risk of losing the lot when the van gets t-boned by a bus, though.
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