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Amazon leverages low-tech FedEx to fix the high-tech problem of data transfer across the Internet
About 10 years ago I remember reading a section in my Computer Science textbook about data transfers across large distances. This was back when regular users had dial-up modem connections and rich companies had dual-bonded ISDN links. Those were the days! Anyway, there was one paragraph which stuck in my mind: if you want to send a lot of data somewhere and you don't care about the latency, the easiest solution is to pack a truck full of tapes and drive to the destination.
And today, despite the death of dial-up, that's exactly what Amazon is doing! Instead of uploading data to Amazon's S3 cloud storage via 'slow' Internet links, you can now mail a tape or hard drive to one of Amazon's data centres in Seattle, Virginia, or Dublin. It's called AWS Import/Export, and to use it you pay a one-off fee of $80 per storage device plus $2.49 per hour while the data is sent into the cloud. There's a calculator, if you want to work out the price savings of using the snail-mail system instead of the Internet.
To me this sounds a lot like a stop-gap solution: we're moving vast amounts of data into the cloud, performing more and more tasks remotely, but Internet connection speeds aren't keeping up! We're heading towards a day when the Internet is effectively just an extension of our local storage, our LAN -- and for that to happen, we need LAN-like links to the Internet!
Hurry up, fiber...
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsRususeruruJun 11th 2010 1:11PM
Sneaker-Net LIVES!
darwinsurvivorJun 11th 2010 8:22PM
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996)
Sebastian AnthonyJun 11th 2010 8:46PM
Hah... you actually dug the quote up :) Fantastic!
Kenneth reitZJun 13th 2010 5:03AM
They have had this for over a year....
ScootahJun 17th 2010 7:35PM
I spent almost 10 years from the mid/late 90's onwards working for a hosting company who is in the top 5 largest in the world. We offered this solution with Zip Drives, CD's, DVD's and tapes for all of that time and it was consistently used throughout that period.
I left the company a few years ago, but the week I left, we had to find a USB zip drive that we could get working, because some customer had been more willing to pay our hourly rate to upload content from a zip drive than to upload the data themselves, or even upgrade to less antiquated technology.
Lots of people have money and technology requirements - but neither the skills nor the motivation to upgrade their local environment.
Sebastian AnthonyJun 17th 2010 8:11PM
Dang... a ZIP drive! That reminds me of those Super Discs -- is that what they were called? Somewhere in between a Zip drive and a floppy disk...