AWS Snowmobile: transporting petabyte of data to the cloud on ... trucks from Amazon

Last year, Amazon introduced a new service AWS Snowmobile, designed for quick physical transfer of data using a capacious storage device. This service provides the ability to send a device to a client of 80 terabytes with pre-installed applications for encrypting and protecting data recorded on this disk. After the recording is completed, the client sends the disk back to Amazon, and the employees of this company send all the information to the cloud.

We were once interested in prices for this service, and, in general, we consider it quite necessary (in specific cases, of course). Now Amazon has introduced another similar service, which was called AWS Snowmobile. And this is not a joke - AWS Snowmobile is a powerful truck 3 meters wide and 13 meters long. The truck body is vandal-proof and very durable. Inside - a system of data storage of huge capacity. In fact, the entire truck is an “external drive” on wheels. It is capable of transmitting data at a rate of 1 terabit per second through a cable and a high-speed switch.


At one time, one such vehicle can transport up to 100 petabytes of data. It will take from a week to 10 days to completely fill the truck with information. A similar time will be needed to transfer all the information received in the Amazon cloud. The power consumption of the truck is 350 kW, so the energy infrastructure must be modern enough to withstand such a load. If there is no suitable capacity, Amazon can offer its own electric generator to the customer.
')
It is clear that such cars are of particular interest to criminals, because such a hi-tech car and its stuffing cost millions of US dollars. Therefore, Amazon, if necessary, provides an escort from the security, the company can select and security guards for the posting on the territory of the data center at the time of information overload.

Each truck is equipped with GPS tracking, video surveillance, working around the clock and an advanced alarm system. The data is encrypted using a 256-bit encryption key, which is stored on the AWS Key Management Service (KMS).



Amazon has announced that this project was created to meet the needs of customers who need to quickly transfer information to the cloud ( Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier ). So, according to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Yassko, the company has customers whose storage volume reaches exabyte. If you transfer all this to the cloud, the client will take more than 26 years with a 10 Gbps connection. Trucks will pump such information in about six months. Representatives of AWS Snowmobile declare that transportation by these trucks is cheaper than transferring the same amount of information over the network.

Unfortunately, the exact cost of the service is not called. On the tariff page it is only stated that each order will be evaluated individually. So far, this service is available only for some US states.

---

Colleagues, we, Kingservers company, are now looking for IT authors for technical sites (not Habrahabr and not Geektimes, third-party Russian-language and English-language resources). A condition - a person who writes an article (it must be literate and technical) must also have the opportunity to publish it on such a resource. If you are such an author, write in a personal.