14 ms·

Amazon Snowball

384 points by polmolea 11y ago

silveira 11y ago
More details https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
vvanders 11y ago
The e-ink display showing a shipping label is brilliant.
- ben174 11y ago
  Kept scrolling and looking for a picture of said label, to no avail.
  - samf 11y ago
    I found an image here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-rugged-storage-appliance-for-importing-data-to-aws-by-fedex/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...
    - dx211 11y ago
      Weird - something about the form factor makes me want to violently toss it off a loading dock. Anyone know how much that would translate to in Gs? (The article says it will survive 6 Gs of shock.)
      - rylee 11y ago
        A whole lot. It depends on how fast it is going. See http://measurespeed.com/deceleration-calculator.php http://measurespeed.com/deceleration-calculator.php for a quick-and-dirty overview. Gravity accelerates at at 9.8m/s², so if it fell for one second before impacting the ground, and took (for instance) 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt, it'd have experienced 8.91 Gs of shock.
        spicyj 11y ago
        One second is a long time. That's a drop of 16 feet?
        rylee 11y ago
        For the purpose of conjecture, yes :-)
        vacri 11y ago
        > 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt I always found it amusing that hard drives were rated in the hundreds of Gs until someone reminded me that 'time to stop' when dropped on a hard surface was very short indeed...
- helper 11y ago
  Yes, this is the most interesting aspect of snowball.
- jstapels 11y ago
  Especially when you consider the fact that they've been making kindle's for years... perfect way to merge existing Amazon technilogies.
- Carrok 11y ago
  This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side. >It has a Kindle on the side, which functions as an automatic shipping label. http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-rugged-storage-appliance-for-importing-data-to-aws-by-fedex/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...
  - jonknee 11y ago
    > This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side. Guess what a Kindle's display is?
  - notatoad 11y ago
    Unless i'm mis-judging the scale of this thing, that screen looks a fair bit smaller than a kindle. I think it's just techcrunch using "kindle" as a generic word for e-ink display.
    - unfletch 11y ago
      The Amazon exec who introduced the Snowball during the keynote also called it included a "Kindle".
      - A010 11y ago
        Perhaps a mini kindle, I estimate by the image that's about 2x4" max.
- tootie 11y ago
  An AWS service with free shipping and a Kindle glued on. It's the ultimate synergy for Amazon.
- nickzoic 11y ago
  Really? Why? I mean, Kindles are pretty cheap, but sticky shipping labels are a few bucks for rolls of 500, and very hard to damage in transit.
  - eru 11y ago
    Oh, this label is smart. It knows when to change. If you had sticky shipping labels, you'd need some intelligence.
mkobit 11y ago
The picture on the page doesn't give me an accurate estimate of the size. They are actually 50 pounds (says on the blog)!
- res0nat0r 11y ago
  They demoed one on stage at re:invent just a bit ago, it is about the size of a desktop PC with hard plastic case all around it. I think he said it is ~47 lbs.
msandford 11y ago
The XKCD about FedEx's bandwidth seems particularly appropriate: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
- guelo 11y ago
  His MicroSD card calculations are off because it would take a month to insert an airplane-load of those cards one by one into some computer to copy them into your storage. Which also makes me wonder why this Snowball device only does Ethernet. Seems like it should have an eSATA port.
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    Maybe it'll be a 10GbE interface?
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Ethernet is most ubiquitous. You don't need physical access to a server with data, just network access. Most environments outside of datacenters don't have 10GbE switches or NICs yet. EDIT: It appears it supports 10GbE natively. I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.
      - scott_karana 11y ago
        > I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds. Yeah, ethernet has pretty much always downgraded well. That's why a 10GBASE-T interface is perfect :P (I should have been more clear with my initialisms)
  - djrogers 11y ago
    Presumably they want a little more control over how data is written and stored on the device than they would get with a simple eSATA connected drive. If they use a simple eSATA drive, they have to worry about formatting, layout, etc., whereas an ethernet connected drive with a bespoke client can hide/control all of that for Amazon. It also gives them easier options for multi-drive, SSD caching, RAID, etc - things they may or may not use today but could without any impact on the end user. * Also, it's 10Gb ethernet. And how many desktops do you have laying around that will recognize a 50Tb eSATA drive?
jonkiddy 11y ago
An AWS version of a sneakernet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
- wanderfowl 11y ago
  Yep, all I could think was "Wow, that's a good deal fancier than a station wagon full of tapes". Cloud backup companies have had similar services for a while now, but it's nice to see AWS adopting it.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out. Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.
    - imajes 11y ago
      Don't forget, there's the ongoing storage cost at S3, which also adds up really quickly.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        3 cents/GB is cheap. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper. $10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).
        ctdonath 11y ago
        iCloud is $10/TB/mo, albeit for different use cases.
iancarroll 11y ago
Isn't this a bit risky? What happens if someone keeps it? 50TB is a lot more than $200.
- silveira 11y ago
  "The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host and stored on the appliance in encrypted form", key is stored in KMS, according to https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - crazysim 11y ago
    I think the poster was talking about someone simply gutting the appliance for the 50TB drives. With a bit of fraud here and there on top.
    - djhworld 11y ago
      From the looks of it the delivery provider is UPS, if they lose it or a rogue employee guts it during transit, I think AWS will probably have clauses in their contracts to go at them full pelt with a lawsuit
- phaer 11y ago
  It might not be the best idea to steal from someone who has your full name and credit card, which Amazon does for AWS customers as far as I know.
  - mpeg 11y ago
    The way this usually goes is that you pay with a prepaid debit card (that doesn't verify name or address). Then you get it shipped to a name and address that are not yours, and you intercept the package before it gets there. It becomes even harder to trace if the name / address / card all match, for instance if you've taken out a credit card on your elderly neighbor's name
chinathrow 11y ago
Another easy method to move your customers data to AWS - where I'm sure some three letter agenices feast over each newly arrived platter of data. I'm still waiting for the big leak on how AWS cooperates with NSA at large.
marcosscriven 11y ago
I thought they already allowed you to mail in hard drives?
- polmolea 11y ago
  They did but you had to buy them yourself and most of the times you didn't have a use for them after. With snowball they manage the process end to end.
  - astrodust 11y ago
    There was also a lot of hassle in ensuring that you included the correct power adapter for each external drive, something that got complicated if you were shipping a lot of different models.
  - larrys 11y ago
    What's interesting is that they don't mention this on the marketing page for snowball. As in "also if you want you can mail your own harddrive, see this page for details". While most would think "why rain on the parade of this new service by mentioning the old service" with Amazon it's more than that. It's this entire idea of weaning people off of legacy ways of doing things (with new names and new processes) so it's harder for any competitor to offer the same type of service, unique way of doing things or handholding. After all anyone can accept (in theory) a mailed in hard drive. Much harder to offer a solution like this with hardware and so on. So to me this is obviously deliberate and consistent with Amazon wanting to raise an entire generation on a new paradigm of getting things done. Edit: And yes this way it's easier for them as well and removes "missing power supplies" (big deal actually by I get the point..)
fensterblick 11y ago
Getting terabytes of data into AWS/Hotel California is great, but wish there was a way to get the data out just as quickly!
- evanpw 11y ago
  > AWS Import/Export Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Yes, but "Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data." http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/introduction.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/introdu...
itsjustjoe 11y ago
In my last role we would often need to upload large amounts of data for our clients to AWS. When this data got into the terabytes we would ship a NAS box to our customer and then send that to Amazon. On more than one occasion Amazon fubar'ed the upload on their end (why would you move drives around in a RAID 5/6 array?). Maybe since this is AWS branded solution it will be more reliable.
mpeg 11y ago
I'm curious about how they're going to approach this from the fraud perspective. This is a $200 charge for a device that has 50TB storage, which would probably cost you around $2000 to buy. There's people out there that will sign a contract under a fake name / address with a phone provider and sell the phones, and the way the providers fight against it usually by running credit checks and verifying address against them. Ultimately, this is very hard to detect when it involves identity theft.
- vvanders 11y ago
  Couldn't you just put a hold for $2k and release it when the device is returned?
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Yes.
  - mpeg 11y ago
    Yes, you could, the pricing page doesn't mention anything about it though, hence why I wonder.
- ececconi 11y ago
  Let's say for the sake of argument that it costs about $100 per use to recover the machine from a labor/time perspective. That means they'll make back the initial investment on the machine in 20 uses. As long as the fraud rate is less than 5%, then this venture from a capital investment perspective still makes sense. Personally, if people intend on using fraud to get free hard drives it will probably be a minority of the population of people who order the services of this device. Plus, you need an AWS account for this.
- unabridged 11y ago
  You still need a credit card attached to the account. A car rental company will give you a $30k vehicle for under $100 on just a credit card.
  - 11y ago
devit 11y ago
As usual, the pricing is not very friendly, and apparently designed to lock your data into AWS or exploit your weak negotiating position once you buy in. While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03). [assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]
- x5n1 11y ago
  Same service needs to run the other way for the same price. $200 to get all your data shipped to you on an appliance/hard drive.
  - rstupek 11y ago
    The service is called AWS Import/Export so it seems you probably can get them to export the data to a snowball for you to get your data.
    - utrex 11y ago
      Right, you can, but you pay for export at $0.03 per GB.
- Hello71 11y ago
  plus $200 for the job
- utrex 11y ago
  teraflop was right, it's $200 per snowball device job, which is currently limited to 50TB. Maybe that will change. You can order multiple jobs to import more data. You have 10 days to complete the transfer and ship it back and then it's $15 a day. $200 buys you 50TB per job, great encryption, and speedy migration. Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... and https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
imajes 11y ago
Say I wanted to do something similar, but move data around locally between two NAS appliances, but not incur a double disk charge - (i've got a pack of ~ 20 disks in NAS brand a, but i want to move to NAS brand b. The disks work in both, but need reformatting). Does anyone know of a service where I could rent a 20TB device like snowball but not push it to S3?
- mey 11y ago
  I know Dell has glorified portable harddrive arrays in pelican styles cases for moving data between their SAN systems. Unfortunately I don't recall the name and I don't know if they are available for rental. If you have a Dell VAR, have them ask the Dell storage group. Edit: Correction, it doesn't appear to be an array, just single device so 1.5-2TB max. Also basically targeted at this SAN solution only.
  - imajes 11y ago
    Yeah, I need to move 20TB in one go - so i can repurpose the disks.
    - Twirrim 11y ago
      https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1515+#spec https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1515+#spec 5 * 6TB drives, RAID5 would put you at nearly 24TB of storage, if my brain is in gear.
      - cthalupa 11y ago
        He wants to rent something temporarily, so that he can copy stuff off the drives, take them out of the nas, format them in the new nas so it's compatible, copy stuff off the rented appliance to the new nas, ship the rented thing back off. He wants to avoid having to have to buy enough drives, etc, to hold all of the data at once
mkobit 11y ago
> Snowball currently supports importing data to AWS. Exporting data out of AWS will be supported in a future release. I'm interested in hearing about how they are going to do this.
copsarebastards 11y ago
Currently 6 out of 30 links on HN are Amazon links, 4 of them in the top 5. Looks like someone paid for placement.
buro9 11y ago
Well, that's an unfortunate name. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball Reminiscent of when Microsoft called an overlay dialog a "floater" and all the South Africans and Brits in the room started laughing. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater (the 2nd definition)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- karlkatzke 11y ago
  I really don't think there's a word that doesn't mean /something/ dirty in some part of the world.
  - antidamage 11y ago
    Yeah, but this is a bit like calling it Amazon Cumswapper. There's no other valid technical use of the word.
    - evan_ 11y ago
      My first connection was "Snowball's chance in hell".
    - eru 11y ago
      > There's no other valid technical use of the word. Now there is.
    - grkvlt 11y ago
      Well, apart from meaning a ball of snow, such as might be thrown by children at each other for fun. Really, that's where my mind went with the word 'snowball', much like the rest of the anglophone world. Yes, there may be slang and other juvenile repurposings of the word, but in normal, everyday (well, wintertime everyday) usage snowball means exactly what the OED says it means. Not sure why anyone would imagine otherwise?
devy 11y ago
It's amazing that Amazon has been vertically integrated so many of both its own and external product/services into this appliances: - Kindle's E-Ink - AWS IAM / KMS/ SNS - Amazon Carrier? (perhaps in the future?) - GPS-powered chain-of-custody tracking (AWS working on it, perhaps Amazon Drone delivery in the future?)
hughes 11y ago
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum
- rsync 11y ago
  You can drive that station wagon right up to your chosen rsync.net location: http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html
sengstrom 11y ago
The math for the time to transfer comparison is interesting: "Even with high-speed Internet connections, it can take months to transfer large amounts of data. For example, 100 terabytes of data will take more than 100 days to transfer over a dedicated 100 Mbps connection. That same transfer can be accomplished in less than one day, plus shipping time, using two Snowball appliances." With a 100 Mbps connection it takes over 100 days [1] but with a 100 times faster connection (10 Gbps) it takes less than a day :) [1] Assuming no network overhead it is 92.6 days
- nacs 11y ago
  Good luck trying to saturate the 10Gbps port (on both the read and write sides) however.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Snowball is just a device with a 10Gbps port – so if you have 10Gbps, you won’t need Snowball ;)
gcb0 11y ago
safer than google option of asking you to ship the un-encrypted drive.
- hrez 11y ago
  encrypt it before shipping
  - gcb0 11y ago
    then they can't import it.
jonknee 11y ago
Sneakernet as a Service!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
driverdan 11y ago
This has interesting security implications for both sides. Is the device 100% offline or does it phone home when you connect it to your network or transmit any other data? What if someone gets the device and hacks it to scan Amazon's networks when sent back?
- icebraining 11y ago
  Most likely, they'll get the same results as if they were scanning from an EC2 machine. I doubt Amazon would put it in a trusted (V)LAN.
  - Tinyyy 11y ago
    But the end user probably trusts the machine 99%, so what if you load it with something malicious, send it back to Amazon and wait for it to be sent to another customer and thus hack their network? That is if Amazon does not completely wipe their drives (Hide it somehow?).
    - Swannie 11y ago
      This is 100% the scenario I was just imagining. Obviously this device has been designed to be a multi-time use device. Amazon definitely do NOT have physical control over this box. They would need to do a complete low level reflash of every single bit of firmware on there, every time it came back. That's not actually that inconceivable in a enterprise grade server, and I hope to see some interesting details about that. But still... just imagine some of the fun HDD firmware hacks making their way onto this. Or NIC firmware. Or even just the embedded Kindle being rooted, and used to sniff out Wifi networks, report its location via 3G, etc. Not to mention the obvious data recovery attacks if the disks have not been wiped to the highest levels. I agree with parent comments, and assume Amazon would put this on its own untrusted VLAN when it comes back. But would they weight it first to see if any pwnies have been inserted into the box? Visually inspect inside to see if physical components have been removed to ensure the weight is actually the same, despite a pwnie inside? I really hope Amazon put out advice to their customers on how to connect this - ideally it should just be on a point to point link to a sacrificial server containing the data.
meritt 11y ago
When I export data from S3, what do I get for a given bucket? Just basically a file system? How is the metadata stored? What about object versions? I'm curious what the end result looks like in doing this.
- icebraining 11y ago
  "Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data." http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/limits....
  - meritt 11y ago
    Wow. Amazon is really embracing the ship fast, break things, roll with the MVP even when it lacks 50% of the features.
    - luhn 11y ago
      Amazon wants to get companies' data into AWS so they're locked in. They don't want that data flowing the other way.
    - vacri 11y ago
      The thing about an MVP is that it is still a VP.
chx 11y ago
I am sure most companies which are the target of this will welcome plugging in an outside device into their internal networks with open arms.
- eru 11y ago
  Relying on securing the perimeter is gonna blow up in their face sooner or later. But in any case, you can just connect it to a sacrificial server on its own network that has nothing else on it.
ck2 11y ago
the E Ink shipping label will automatically update Are you kidding me? Instead of a 25 cent shipping label they use a $100 e-ink display? The display alone might get the device stolen.
- gamegoblin 11y ago
  They mentioned in the keynote they are using a kindle as the display; given that Amazon sells refurbished kindles for $65, I imagine the actual cost is a good bit lower. They also mentioned that the kindle also functions as the user-interface, so it's more than a glorified shipping label.
- balls187 11y ago
  Tearing apart the system would yield significantly more valuable hardware than just the kindle.
softwarerocks 11y ago
All the innovation at AWS is amazing. If they every stop charging by the Gigabyte for bandwidth and move to a flat model then I would be tempted to switch to them for all my sites.
- tomschlick 11y ago
  Why would they do that? It makes sense to charge per gb. It gets people using them when they are small and its cheap to use S3/EC2 and then as they scale up its easier to just stick with AWS.
- Twirrim 11y ago
  Peering links are charge on a consumed bandwidth basis (in a weird sliding scale fashion depending on your balance of egress vs ingress. The closer to 1:1 the better) rather than the fixed fee you pay your ISP. I used to work for an ISP that would juggle which peering links the usenet servers were favouring to make things more favourable :D
spot 11y ago
Can this work with Arq?
pc2g4d 11y ago
Named after the horse in Animal Farm?
- Swannie 11y ago
  I assume named after the fact that a snowball is a lump of cloud matter, in a flight ready state?
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  Named for what your AWS bill will do after you lock up all your data inside of it.
letstryagain 11y ago
They should have called it 'speedball'
rajeshmoov 11y ago
interesting how much we need to pay for the GB
beachstartup 11y ago
the biggest message this sends is something nobody is talking about: amazon is not afraid of sending hardware on-premises.
stonogo 11y ago
Forgive me, but what exactly is 'petabyte-scale' about a 50TB NAS with a dog-slow link?
lisper 11y ago
But can you trust it? When I returned to JPL after working at Google for a year I was tasked with evaluating a Google Search Appliance. We ultimately decided not to keep it, and so we had to erase the disks, which now contained sensitive data. The appliance had a "self-destruct" feature that supposedly erased all the data, but there was no way to verify it. After lengthy negotiations with Google (some people just have a hard time grasping the idea that just because a file has been deleted doesn't mean the data is actually gone) we eventually got them to agree to let us open the enclosure and take out the disks. Forensic analysis revealed that they had not in fact been erased. Caveat emptor.
- Swannie 11y ago
  From: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... "...The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host [running the Snowball client?] and stored on the appliance in encrypted form. The appliance can be hosted on a private subnet with limited network access." So I assume the data is encrypted asymetrically. "...ship it back to us for ingestion. We’ll decrypt the data [using the private key specified in the job,] and copy it to the S3 bucket(s) that you specified when you made your request[/job]. Then we’ll sanitize the appliance in accordance with NIST Special Publication 800-88 (Guidelines for Media Sanitization)." That links to http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-88r1.pdf http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP... There are a few different types of sanitisation (clear/purge/destroy), and Amazon doesn't specify which type. I assume they would go with "clear", and maybe in a few select places (I'd hope storage media) "purge". "Clear" is scary though, as for network devices, it is only "full manufacturer’s reset to reset the router or switch back to its factory default settings", and for HDD's it is "Overwrite media by using organizationally approved and validated overwriting technologies/methods/tools. The Clear procedure should consist of at least one pass of writes with a fixed data value, such as all zeros. Multiple passes or more complex values may optionally be used". So what vector do you want to protect? Accidental data egress shouldn't happen as the data is encrypted. However there are more interesting vectors, such as getting hold of the public key and injecting your own data into another companies buckets...
timonv 11y ago
Oh amazon please get your naming right. Why does every service have to be named so utterly confusing? I was expected some kind of cloud NLP library. Would have been cool. Out of curiosity, does anyone have a real life example where they send petabytes over the wire? You know, outside the adult industry.
- dagw 11y ago
  Lots of scientific experiments can easily generate huge data sets of raw measurements that need to be moved from the locations of measuring instruments back to the lab.

384 points by polmolea 11y ago

More details https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...

vvanders 11y ago

The e-ink display showing a shipping label is brilliant.

ben174 11y ago
Kept scrolling and looking for a picture of said label, to no avail.
- samf 11y ago
  I found an image here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-rugged-storage-appliance-for-importing-data-to-aws-by-fedex/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...
  - dx211 11y ago
    Weird - something about the form factor makes me want to violently toss it off a loading dock. Anyone know how much that would translate to in Gs? (The article says it will survive 6 Gs of shock.)
    - rylee 11y ago
      A whole lot. It depends on how fast it is going. See http://measurespeed.com/deceleration-calculator.php http://measurespeed.com/deceleration-calculator.php for a quick-and-dirty overview. Gravity accelerates at at 9.8m/s², so if it fell for one second before impacting the ground, and took (for instance) 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt, it'd have experienced 8.91 Gs of shock.
      - spicyj 11y ago
        One second is a long time. That's a drop of 16 feet?
        rylee 11y ago
        For the purpose of conjecture, yes :-)
      - vacri 11y ago
        > 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt I always found it amusing that hard drives were rated in the hundreds of Gs until someone reminded me that 'time to stop' when dropped on a hard surface was very short indeed...
helper 11y ago
Yes, this is the most interesting aspect of snowball.
jstapels 11y ago
Especially when you consider the fact that they've been making kindle's for years... perfect way to merge existing Amazon technilogies.
Carrok 11y ago
This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side. >It has a Kindle on the side, which functions as an automatic shipping label. http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-rugged-storage-appliance-for-importing-data-to-aws-by-fedex/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...
- jonknee 11y ago
  > This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side. Guess what a Kindle's display is?
- notatoad 11y ago
  Unless i'm mis-judging the scale of this thing, that screen looks a fair bit smaller than a kindle. I think it's just techcrunch using "kindle" as a generic word for e-ink display.
  - unfletch 11y ago
    The Amazon exec who introduced the Snowball during the keynote also called it included a "Kindle".
    - A010 11y ago
      Perhaps a mini kindle, I estimate by the image that's about 2x4" max.
tootie 11y ago
An AWS service with free shipping and a Kindle glued on. It's the ultimate synergy for Amazon.
nickzoic 11y ago
Really? Why? I mean, Kindles are pretty cheap, but sticky shipping labels are a few bucks for rolls of 500, and very hard to damage in transit.
- eru 11y ago
  Oh, this label is smart. It knows when to change. If you had sticky shipping labels, you'd need some intelligence.

mkobit 11y ago

The picture on the page doesn't give me an accurate estimate of the size. They are actually 50 pounds (says on the blog)!

res0nat0r 11y ago
They demoed one on stage at re:invent just a bit ago, it is about the size of a desktop PC with hard plastic case all around it. I think he said it is ~47 lbs.

msandford 11y ago

The XKCD about FedEx's bandwidth seems particularly appropriate: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

guelo 11y ago
His MicroSD card calculations are off because it would take a month to insert an airplane-load of those cards one by one into some computer to copy them into your storage. Which also makes me wonder why this Snowball device only does Ethernet. Seems like it should have an eSATA port.
- scott_karana 11y ago
  Maybe it'll be a 10GbE interface?
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Ethernet is most ubiquitous. You don't need physical access to a server with data, just network access. Most environments outside of datacenters don't have 10GbE switches or NICs yet. EDIT: It appears it supports 10GbE natively. I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.
    - scott_karana 11y ago
      > I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds. Yeah, ethernet has pretty much always downgraded well. That's why a 10GBASE-T interface is perfect :P (I should have been more clear with my initialisms)
- djrogers 11y ago
  Presumably they want a little more control over how data is written and stored on the device than they would get with a simple eSATA connected drive. If they use a simple eSATA drive, they have to worry about formatting, layout, etc., whereas an ethernet connected drive with a bespoke client can hide/control all of that for Amazon. It also gives them easier options for multi-drive, SSD caching, RAID, etc - things they may or may not use today but could without any impact on the end user. * Also, it's 10Gb ethernet. And how many desktops do you have laying around that will recognize a 50Tb eSATA drive?

jonkiddy 11y ago

An AWS version of a sneakernet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

wanderfowl 11y ago
Yep, all I could think was "Wow, that's a good deal fancier than a station wagon full of tapes". Cloud backup companies have had similar services for a while now, but it's nice to see AWS adopting it.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out. Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.
  - imajes 11y ago
    Don't forget, there's the ongoing storage cost at S3, which also adds up really quickly.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      3 cents/GB is cheap. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper. $10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).
      - ctdonath 11y ago
        iCloud is $10/TB/mo, albeit for different use cases.

iancarroll 11y ago

Isn't this a bit risky? What happens if someone keeps it? 50TB is a lot more than $200.

silveira 11y ago
"The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host and stored on the appliance in encrypted form", key is stored in KMS, according to https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- crazysim 11y ago
  I think the poster was talking about someone simply gutting the appliance for the 50TB drives. With a bit of fraud here and there on top.
  - djhworld 11y ago
    From the looks of it the delivery provider is UPS, if they lose it or a rogue employee guts it during transit, I think AWS will probably have clauses in their contracts to go at them full pelt with a lawsuit
phaer 11y ago
It might not be the best idea to steal from someone who has your full name and credit card, which Amazon does for AWS customers as far as I know.
- mpeg 11y ago
  The way this usually goes is that you pay with a prepaid debit card (that doesn't verify name or address). Then you get it shipped to a name and address that are not yours, and you intercept the package before it gets there. It becomes even harder to trace if the name / address / card all match, for instance if you've taken out a credit card on your elderly neighbor's name

chinathrow 11y ago

Another easy method to move your customers data to AWS - where I'm sure some three letter agenices feast over each newly arrived platter of data. I'm still waiting for the big leak on how AWS cooperates with NSA at large.

marcosscriven 11y ago

I thought they already allowed you to mail in hard drives?

polmolea 11y ago
They did but you had to buy them yourself and most of the times you didn't have a use for them after. With snowball they manage the process end to end.
- astrodust 11y ago
  There was also a lot of hassle in ensuring that you included the correct power adapter for each external drive, something that got complicated if you were shipping a lot of different models.
- larrys 11y ago
  What's interesting is that they don't mention this on the marketing page for snowball. As in "also if you want you can mail your own harddrive, see this page for details". While most would think "why rain on the parade of this new service by mentioning the old service" with Amazon it's more than that. It's this entire idea of weaning people off of legacy ways of doing things (with new names and new processes) so it's harder for any competitor to offer the same type of service, unique way of doing things or handholding. After all anyone can accept (in theory) a mailed in hard drive. Much harder to offer a solution like this with hardware and so on. So to me this is obviously deliberate and consistent with Amazon wanting to raise an entire generation on a new paradigm of getting things done. Edit: And yes this way it's easier for them as well and removes "missing power supplies" (big deal actually by I get the point..)

fensterblick 11y ago

Getting terabytes of data into AWS/Hotel California is great, but wish there was a way to get the data out just as quickly!

evanpw 11y ago
> AWS Import/Export Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Yes, but "Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data." http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/introduction.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/introdu...

itsjustjoe 11y ago

In my last role we would often need to upload large amounts of data for our clients to AWS. When this data got into the terabytes we would ship a NAS box to our customer and then send that to Amazon. On more than one occasion Amazon fubar'ed the upload on their end (why would you move drives around in a RAID 5/6 array?). Maybe since this is AWS branded solution it will be more reliable.

mpeg 11y ago

I'm curious about how they're going to approach this from the fraud perspective. This is a $200 charge for a device that has 50TB storage, which would probably cost you around $2000 to buy. There's people out there that will sign a contract under a fake name / address with a phone provider and sell the phones, and the way the providers fight against it usually by running credit checks and verifying address against them. Ultimately, this is very hard to detect when it involves identity theft.

vvanders 11y ago
Couldn't you just put a hold for $2k and release it when the device is returned?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Yes.
- mpeg 11y ago
  Yes, you could, the pricing page doesn't mention anything about it though, hence why I wonder.
ececconi 11y ago
Let's say for the sake of argument that it costs about $100 per use to recover the machine from a labor/time perspective. That means they'll make back the initial investment on the machine in 20 uses. As long as the fraud rate is less than 5%, then this venture from a capital investment perspective still makes sense. Personally, if people intend on using fraud to get free hard drives it will probably be a minority of the population of people who order the services of this device. Plus, you need an AWS account for this.
unabridged 11y ago
You still need a credit card attached to the account. A car rental company will give you a $30k vehicle for under $100 on just a credit card.
- 11y ago

devit 11y ago

As usual, the pricing is not very friendly, and apparently designed to lock your data into AWS or exploit your weak negotiating position once you buy in. While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03). [assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]

x5n1 11y ago
Same service needs to run the other way for the same price. $200 to get all your data shipped to you on an appliance/hard drive.
- rstupek 11y ago
  The service is called AWS Import/Export so it seems you probably can get them to export the data to a snowball for you to get your data.
  - utrex 11y ago
    Right, you can, but you pay for export at $0.03 per GB.
Hello71 11y ago
plus $200 for the job
utrex 11y ago
teraflop was right, it's $200 per snowball device job, which is currently limited to 50TB. Maybe that will change. You can order multiple jobs to import more data. You have 10 days to complete the transfer and ship it back and then it's $15 a day. $200 buys you 50TB per job, great encryption, and speedy migration. Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... and https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

imajes 11y ago

Say I wanted to do something similar, but move data around locally between two NAS appliances, but not incur a double disk charge - (i've got a pack of ~ 20 disks in NAS brand a, but i want to move to NAS brand b. The disks work in both, but need reformatting). Does anyone know of a service where I could rent a 20TB device like snowball but not push it to S3?

mey 11y ago
I know Dell has glorified portable harddrive arrays in pelican styles cases for moving data between their SAN systems. Unfortunately I don't recall the name and I don't know if they are available for rental. If you have a Dell VAR, have them ask the Dell storage group. Edit: Correction, it doesn't appear to be an array, just single device so 1.5-2TB max. Also basically targeted at this SAN solution only.
- imajes 11y ago
  Yeah, I need to move 20TB in one go - so i can repurpose the disks.
  - Twirrim 11y ago
    https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1515+#spec https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1515+#spec 5 * 6TB drives, RAID5 would put you at nearly 24TB of storage, if my brain is in gear.
    - cthalupa 11y ago
      He wants to rent something temporarily, so that he can copy stuff off the drives, take them out of the nas, format them in the new nas so it's compatible, copy stuff off the rented appliance to the new nas, ship the rented thing back off. He wants to avoid having to have to buy enough drives, etc, to hold all of the data at once

mkobit 11y ago

> Snowball currently supports importing data to AWS. Exporting data out of AWS will be supported in a future release. I'm interested in hearing about how they are going to do this.

copsarebastards 11y ago

Currently 6 out of 30 links on HN are Amazon links, 4 of them in the top 5. Looks like someone paid for placement.

buro9 11y ago

Well, that's an unfortunate name. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball Reminiscent of when Microsoft called an overlay dialog a "floater" and all the South Africans and Brits in the room started laughing. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater (the 2nd definition)

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
karlkatzke 11y ago
I really don't think there's a word that doesn't mean /something/ dirty in some part of the world.
- antidamage 11y ago
  Yeah, but this is a bit like calling it Amazon Cumswapper. There's no other valid technical use of the word.
  - evan_ 11y ago
    My first connection was "Snowball's chance in hell".
  - eru 11y ago
    > There's no other valid technical use of the word. Now there is.
  - grkvlt 11y ago
    Well, apart from meaning a ball of snow, such as might be thrown by children at each other for fun. Really, that's where my mind went with the word 'snowball', much like the rest of the anglophone world. Yes, there may be slang and other juvenile repurposings of the word, but in normal, everyday (well, wintertime everyday) usage snowball means exactly what the OED says it means. Not sure why anyone would imagine otherwise?

devy 11y ago

It's amazing that Amazon has been vertically integrated so many of both its own and external product/services into this appliances: - Kindle's E-Ink - AWS IAM / KMS/ SNS - Amazon Carrier? (perhaps in the future?) - GPS-powered chain-of-custody tracking (AWS working on it, perhaps Amazon Drone delivery in the future?)

hughes 11y ago

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

rsync 11y ago
You can drive that station wagon right up to your chosen rsync.net location: http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html

sengstrom 11y ago

The math for the time to transfer comparison is interesting: "Even with high-speed Internet connections, it can take months to transfer large amounts of data. For example, 100 terabytes of data will take more than 100 days to transfer over a dedicated 100 Mbps connection. That same transfer can be accomplished in less than one day, plus shipping time, using two Snowball appliances." With a 100 Mbps connection it takes over 100 days [1] but with a 100 times faster connection (10 Gbps) it takes less than a day :) [1] Assuming no network overhead it is 92.6 days

nacs 11y ago
Good luck trying to saturate the 10Gbps port (on both the read and write sides) however.
kuschku 11y ago
Snowball is just a device with a 10Gbps port – so if you have 10Gbps, you won’t need Snowball ;)

gcb0 11y ago

safer than google option of asking you to ship the un-encrypted drive.

hrez 11y ago
encrypt it before shipping
- gcb0 11y ago
  then they can't import it.

jonknee 11y ago

Sneakernet as a Service!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

driverdan 11y ago

This has interesting security implications for both sides. Is the device 100% offline or does it phone home when you connect it to your network or transmit any other data? What if someone gets the device and hacks it to scan Amazon's networks when sent back?

icebraining 11y ago
Most likely, they'll get the same results as if they were scanning from an EC2 machine. I doubt Amazon would put it in a trusted (V)LAN.
- Tinyyy 11y ago
  But the end user probably trusts the machine 99%, so what if you load it with something malicious, send it back to Amazon and wait for it to be sent to another customer and thus hack their network? That is if Amazon does not completely wipe their drives (Hide it somehow?).
  - Swannie 11y ago
    This is 100% the scenario I was just imagining. Obviously this device has been designed to be a multi-time use device. Amazon definitely do NOT have physical control over this box. They would need to do a complete low level reflash of every single bit of firmware on there, every time it came back. That's not actually that inconceivable in a enterprise grade server, and I hope to see some interesting details about that. But still... just imagine some of the fun HDD firmware hacks making their way onto this. Or NIC firmware. Or even just the embedded Kindle being rooted, and used to sniff out Wifi networks, report its location via 3G, etc. Not to mention the obvious data recovery attacks if the disks have not been wiped to the highest levels. I agree with parent comments, and assume Amazon would put this on its own untrusted VLAN when it comes back. But would they weight it first to see if any pwnies have been inserted into the box? Visually inspect inside to see if physical components have been removed to ensure the weight is actually the same, despite a pwnie inside? I really hope Amazon put out advice to their customers on how to connect this - ideally it should just be on a point to point link to a sacrificial server containing the data.

meritt 11y ago

When I export data from S3, what do I get for a given bucket? Just basically a file system? How is the metadata stored? What about object versions? I'm curious what the end result looks like in doing this.

icebraining 11y ago
"Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data." http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/limits....
- meritt 11y ago
  Wow. Amazon is really embracing the ship fast, break things, roll with the MVP even when it lacks 50% of the features.
  - luhn 11y ago
    Amazon wants to get companies' data into AWS so they're locked in. They don't want that data flowing the other way.
  - vacri 11y ago
    The thing about an MVP is that it is still a VP.

chx 11y ago

I am sure most companies which are the target of this will welcome plugging in an outside device into their internal networks with open arms.

eru 11y ago
Relying on securing the perimeter is gonna blow up in their face sooner or later. But in any case, you can just connect it to a sacrificial server on its own network that has nothing else on it.

ck2 11y ago

the E Ink shipping label will automatically update Are you kidding me? Instead of a 25 cent shipping label they use a $100 e-ink display? The display alone might get the device stolen.

gamegoblin 11y ago
They mentioned in the keynote they are using a kindle as the display; given that Amazon sells refurbished kindles for $65, I imagine the actual cost is a good bit lower. They also mentioned that the kindle also functions as the user-interface, so it's more than a glorified shipping label.
balls187 11y ago
Tearing apart the system would yield significantly more valuable hardware than just the kindle.

softwarerocks 11y ago

All the innovation at AWS is amazing. If they every stop charging by the Gigabyte for bandwidth and move to a flat model then I would be tempted to switch to them for all my sites.

tomschlick 11y ago
Why would they do that? It makes sense to charge per gb. It gets people using them when they are small and its cheap to use S3/EC2 and then as they scale up its easier to just stick with AWS.
Twirrim 11y ago
Peering links are charge on a consumed bandwidth basis (in a weird sliding scale fashion depending on your balance of egress vs ingress. The closer to 1:1 the better) rather than the fixed fee you pay your ISP. I used to work for an ISP that would juggle which peering links the usenet servers were favouring to make things more favourable :D

spot 11y ago

Can this work with Arq?

pc2g4d 11y ago

Named after the horse in Animal Farm?

Swannie 11y ago
I assume named after the fact that a snowball is a lump of cloud matter, in a flight ready state?
DonHopkins 11y ago
Named for what your AWS bill will do after you lock up all your data inside of it.

letstryagain 11y ago

They should have called it 'speedball'

rajeshmoov 11y ago

interesting how much we need to pay for the GB

beachstartup 11y ago

the biggest message this sends is something nobody is talking about: amazon is not afraid of sending hardware on-premises.

stonogo 11y ago

Forgive me, but what exactly is 'petabyte-scale' about a 50TB NAS with a dog-slow link?

lisper 11y ago

But can you trust it? When I returned to JPL after working at Google for a year I was tasked with evaluating a Google Search Appliance. We ultimately decided not to keep it, and so we had to erase the disks, which now contained sensitive data. The appliance had a "self-destruct" feature that supposedly erased all the data, but there was no way to verify it. After lengthy negotiations with Google (some people just have a hard time grasping the idea that just because a file has been deleted doesn't mean the data is actually gone) we eventually got them to agree to let us open the enclosure and take out the disks. Forensic analysis revealed that they had not in fact been erased. Caveat emptor.

Swannie 11y ago
From: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... "...The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host [running the Snowball client?] and stored on the appliance in encrypted form. The appliance can be hosted on a private subnet with limited network access." So I assume the data is encrypted asymetrically. "...ship it back to us for ingestion. We’ll decrypt the data [using the private key specified in the job,] and copy it to the S3 bucket(s) that you specified when you made your request[/job]. Then we’ll sanitize the appliance in accordance with NIST Special Publication 800-88 (Guidelines for Media Sanitization)." That links to http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-88r1.pdf http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP... There are a few different types of sanitisation (clear/purge/destroy), and Amazon doesn't specify which type. I assume they would go with "clear", and maybe in a few select places (I'd hope storage media) "purge". "Clear" is scary though, as for network devices, it is only "full manufacturer’s reset to reset the router or switch back to its factory default settings", and for HDD's it is "Overwrite media by using organizationally approved and validated overwriting technologies/methods/tools. The Clear procedure should consist of at least one pass of writes with a fixed data value, such as all zeros. Multiple passes or more complex values may optionally be used". So what vector do you want to protect? Accidental data egress shouldn't happen as the data is encrypted. However there are more interesting vectors, such as getting hold of the public key and injecting your own data into another companies buckets...

timonv 11y ago

Oh amazon please get your naming right. Why does every service have to be named so utterly confusing? I was expected some kind of cloud NLP library. Would have been cool. Out of curiosity, does anyone have a real life example where they send petabytes over the wire? You know, outside the adult industry.

dagw 11y ago
Lots of scientific experiments can easily generate huge data sets of raw measurements that need to be moved from the locations of measuring instruments back to the lab.