There are a lot of advantages to storing your big data in the cloud. Start-ups can get going without having to set up servers and data centers.
However, what about organizations that already have data centers? How do you move petabytes of valuable data to a cloud provider? You rarely see much coverage of this—because it’s a difficult problem.
There are no clever technical solutions. Amazon’s solution extends one of the oldest electronic data transfers strategies around—the sneakernet.
First, they introduced the Snowball—a suitcase of SSDs that can hold 80 terabytes (TB) of data. You fill it up at your data center and ship it to Amazon.
“80 TB?!”, I hear you scoff. “I’m not moving my kid’s blog.”
OK. Well, fear not—Amazon has your back. Let me introduce you to their Snowmobile—an 18-wheel truck that’ll hold 100 petabytes of data.
Drive up, fill it with your cat GIFs, tear down the highway and upload it to AWS. Now you’re running in the cloud.
Clarkson must have had something to do with this.
