Cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, unveils new offerings at annual conference in Las Vegas
By JAY GREENE and LAURA STEVENS
November 30, 2016
Amazon unveiled the ‘Snowmobile’ service on Wednesday in Las Vegas. PHOTO: AMAZON WEB SERVICES
LAS VEGAS—In Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com Inc. has built one of the most powerful computing networks in the world, on pace to post more than $12 billion in revenue this year.
But the retail giant on Wednesday proposed a surprising way to move data from large corporate customers’ data centers to its public cloud-computing operation: by truck.
Networks can move massive amounts of data only so fast. Trucks, it turns out, can move it faster.
To the sound of throbbing heavy-metal music and flashes of strobe lights, Amazon drove a big rig onto the floor of the Sands Expo & Convention Center during the company’s annual customer conference.
The tractor-trailer hauls a massive storage device, dubbed Snowmobile, in the form of a 45-foot shipping container that holds 100 petabytes of data. A petabyte is about 1 million gigabytes.
Transporting data from companies to cloud providers has become immensely time-consuming as corporate data storage has ballooned from terabytes to petabytes to exabytes, each step a factor of roughly 1,000 larger than the last.
“When we started AWS [in 2006], the notion of an exabyte of data just seemed completely out there,” AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy said. “Today, an exabyte of data is much more common.” That is equivalent to about 250 million DVDs or one trillion books of 400 pages each.
Amazon plans to drive Snowmobiles to its customers’ offices, extract their data, then cruise to an Amazon facility where the information can be transferred to the cloud-computing network in far less time than it would for so much data to travel over the web.
The company, however, isn’t promising lightning speed. Ten Snowmobiles would reduce the time it takes to move an exabyte from on-premises storage to Amazon’s cloud to a little less than six months, from about 26 years using a high-speed internet connection, by the company’s calculations.
During a press conference, Mr. Jassy declined to disclose the cost of each Snowmobile unit but noted that the company has “several” of them. The trucks are currently available and customers are using them, he said. Snowmobile will cost half a cent per gigabyte per month of use, or about $500,000 a month to use its full capacity.
Comments are closed