Most of us are quite content with our flash drives and external hard disks when we need to move large amounts of data around. But what happens if you’re a huge research institution like CERN, or a gigantic company that needs to upload hundreds of petabytes of data to the cloud? It used to be quite a complicated problem, but now Amazon has an easy answer.
The largest cloud company in the world has just unveiled its latest product. No, it’s not some new sort of processor, or e-reader, or voice assistant. It’s a big truck, that will come by your place of business, pick up your data and store it in the cloud. Called the “Snowmobile”, the large truck features a mobile datacenter that can pack in as much as 100 petabytes of data.
It turns out, going down the highway, is the most efficient, not to mention fastest, way to send such massive amounts of data in today’s world. Even with a gigabit connection uploading 100 petabytes would take many years, so having a truck pull up to your datacenter is much more economical.
Amazon hasn’t release any pricing details just yet, though the company is aiming the project at researchers and large companies. The company did say its service would be both faster and less expensive than a network-based transfer model, though that’s obviously not saying much.
Source: The Guardian