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AWS Snowmobile – Move Exabytes of Data to the Cloud in Weeks
- dx034 10y agoI wonder why this makes sense. Isn't it more useful to get a few hundred snowballs and ship them via Fedex? You can transfer in parallel and should be at the same speed as with Snowmobile. It's at the DC next day and the data will be faster in S3 than by truck. Also, the economies of scale will never pay off for Snowmobile, likely more for Snowball. At the same time, logistics (incl insurance and security) is handled by companies that are very good at it. Fedex, DHL and the like offer physical security services for goods if you need it in addition to encryption. Think it's a PR move only. They will probably find a few clients to somehow utilize one truck, but I don't think it's more efficient than Snowballs.
- robbiemitchell 10y ago> However, customers with exabyte-scale on-premises storage look at the 80 TB, do the math, and realize that an all-out data migration would still require lots of devices and some headache-inducing logistics.
- dx034 10y agoLots of devices certainly. But headache-inducing logistics? I think getting snowballs via Fedex/DHL, copying them and sending them back is easier than figuring out how to connect the truck to your in-house datacentre. Most won't have a spare 1Tbit/s connection in the parking lot.
- phalangion 10y agoIf you're looking to transfer 100s of petabytes, I imagine you'd find a way to get a 1Tbps connection to the parking lot, rather than connect and disconnect thousands of Snowballs. It's clearly intended for a different use case than transferring a few petabytes.
- gfv 10y ago"One Snowmobile can transport up to one hundred petabytes of data in a single trip, the equivalent of using about 1,250 AWS Snowball devices." -- https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ You'd have to find a thousand 1GBe ports in your data center (unless Amazon would ship an expensive switch along with Snowballs) -- that's about two server cages' (10 racks x42U) worth. You will have to find a lot of power -- while Snowmobile can bring a generator. I doubt there will be a lot of demand for Snowmobiles, though.
- dx034 10y agoIf you don't have the ports for Snowballs, you won't have them for Snowmobiles. And instead of copying 1 week, shipping, copying another week back, you can have the first data over after 1 day. This can be crucial to already integrate data before everything's there. I understand the size of a Snowmobile, but if you don't somehow utilize it exactly 100%, I don't think building your own solution is cheaper than renting logistics as a service from others. Basically AWS in the logistics world.
- ghshephard 10y agoThe advantage with Snowmobile is you only need a dozen or so ports, not hundreds. Also - think about the person having to do this - If I had to move 100 petabytes of data to AWS - I really don't want to be messing around with hundreds of appliances, tracking them, figuring what we uploaded onto what devices, figuring out how to fragment the data to properly fit on all the devices, etc.... Definitely want to go the Snowmobile route.
- Johnny555 10y agoI'm not sure that's true -- thinking about our own (small) datacenter, we can find 10 10 gig ports much easier than we could scrounge up 100 1 gbit ports that are in the right place on the network to do a big data transfer like this (i.e. we're not going to open cabinets to plug snowballs into 10 different top of rack switches). Sure we could buy more switches to fan out our spare 10gig ports into 1gig ports, but why bother when AWS has them built-in to the truck? It seems that any datacenter that's big enough to have a PB of data is going to be able to find 25 40 GBit ports easier than 1000 1Gbit ports. Even if you only utilize 25% of the Snowmobile, that's 250 individual Snowballs you don't have to handle. (just bounced this off of one of our network engineers -- if we did have to handle 100 snowballs, we would buy switches, set them up in the big conference room next to the datacenter and run the 10 gig fiber drops over to that conference room where the snowballs would be. He said we're probably looking at $30K in hardware costs to set it up, so the Snowmobile might be cheaper even for 100 snowballs worth of data)
- kabdib 10y agoInstalling, powering and cabling "a few hundred" of anything in a datacenter is a big deal. You probably don't have room. You may not have power. You have to deal with hundreds of boxes, cardboard isn't allowed on the datacenter floor (ideally), and just mucking around on the loading dock wrangling stupid stuff like shipping labels is going to suck up a ton of time. [I'm a C++ dev who likes to help design and build datacenters. It's fun.]
- dx034 10y agoBut isn't that the same problem with the truck? You also need to get that connected to the datacenter for a week? I guess as that connection has to leave the building, it should be even harder?
- ghshephard 10y agoJust run a conduit of fiber out to the parking lot temporarily.
- ewindisch 10y agoThe Snowball ships bare, without packing materials. You receive it, plug it in, transfer data / run code, and ship it. Still, you're right that there's a logistic issue of physically locating, networking, and powering these devices.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoI'd wager this is already basically a trailer full of racked snowballs, perhaps without the ruggedized enclosures.
- JackFr 10y agoAtomic transaction FTW.
- gist 10y ago> Isn't it more useful to get a few hundred snowballs and ship them via Fedex? Corporate types, spending loads of company money, are more interested in convenience and turn key solutions to problems that rigs that cost less but give more to think about or other issues.
- joelthelion 10y agoI'd love to see actual pictures of that truck :)
- chucknelson 10y agoThey at least have external pictures of the "rig" on the main landing page: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
- wehadfun 10y agoApparently the author would to. PPS – I will build and personally deliver (in exchange for a photo op and a bloggable story) Snowmobile models to the first 5 customers.
- tyingq 10y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-will-truck-your-massive-piles-of-data-to-the-cloud-with-an-18-wheeler/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-will-truck-your-mas...
- FryHigh 10y agoI feel unusual when I see articles like this. I deploy "workloads" that require instances, auto scaling, Multi-AZ etc. It makes my projects feel minuscule at the scale of other companies that actually use something like this! I wonder how many companies will actually use this in any given year.
- Beltiras 10y agoI imagine surprisingly many. I have operations that are not remotely on that scale. 8 employees with total data on the order of tens of terabytes. I found that to be a surprisingly heavy density of data per employee. A 1000 employee company with the same density is on the petabyte scale.
- neals 10y agoThis really helps me, personally, abstract the concept of 'data' a lot more. It's not about files or records, data has a 'volume'. A few PB fills up a shipping container. Next time my client asks me how "much" a PB is, I can just say "about a shippingcontainer's worth".
- ksec 10y agoThis! So when some one thing 1EB is alot, we can "Nah, is only about 10 45feet containers of data" I wonder what HDD capacity does it use, and when if we could see a 1EB per container.
- rockostrich 10y agoBut bytes/volume isn't a constant. You may be able to say a 100 PB is equal to about a shipping container now, but in 10 years it will be much smaller (probably not keeping up with Moore's Law for storage though).
- masklinn 10y agoEven then it depends on medium, an LTO-7 or HDD can store ~26GB/cm3 while an SDXC tops out at around 1TB/cm3.
- joseph 10y agoIt depends on how the drives are packaged. A 2.5" SSD enclosure is much bigger than the actual storage device inside, which is closer in size to an SD card. Most of the bulk of this Snowmobile is probably taken up by enclosures.
- chucknelson 10y agoI love how this is a literal trailer pulled by a truck - see the pictures at https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/. I wish they gave more details as to what hardware was in there - are there any pictures of what the trailer looks like on the inside?
- paco3346 10y agoI'm at re:invent and they have a "making of" video next to a demo unit. They only show the physical construction of the power distribution and the raised floor. (Nothing about the racks or what's in them.) It also appears that you never have access to the inside where the racks are. You can only access the last ~4 feet for power and data connections.
- tyingq 10y agoCouldn't find any pictures of the inside, but techcrunch did get some high resolution photos of the outside, including the chiller connections: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-will-truck-your-massive-piles-of-data-to-the-cloud-with-an-18-wheeler/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-will-truck-your-mas...
- zeristor 10y agoSo sneaker net was once someone walking around with burnt CD-ROM, then it was a box of drives, and now its a truck. Quite a dramatic illustration of the increase in data usage. If one extrapolates next stop will be a train, and then a container ship full of hard drives.
- masklinn 10y ago> then it was a box of drives, and now its a truck. Between that was FEDEX-ing a NAS. That's pretty much the standard data-exchange format in astronomy, so you have a fast link and don't need to bother plugging a bunch of drives in, just plug the NAS to the power and network and off you go.
- zeristor 10y ago
- aeharding 10y agoBecause it's a shipping container, maybe eventually they'll do worldwide data transfer?
- dx034 10y agoProbably by plane. Shipping would otherwise probably be slower than using the network.
- masklinn 10y agoWorst case shipping is ~30 days (e.g. China to Hamburg), which is 38.6GB/s for 100PB in a container. I doubt you have a permanent dedicated 40+GB link between you and the nearest AWS data center. Shipping by boat would still be way faster than a network upload.
- dx034 10y agoYou are correct, I had my math wrong. But don't know if they're certified for shipping, not sure how the sea transport would affect the drives?
- masklinn 10y agoWell if the container is completely and securely sealed it should not affect the drives, after all the drives or other parts are shipped from factories. But yeah I'd expect air-shipping as well, if only so that the container can be kept secure, I doubt Amazon is going to send security personnel for week-long trips on cargo ships.
- wazoox 10y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073176
- jklein11 10y agoMaybe someone at Amazon was reading xkcd[1] 1. https://xkcd.com/949/ https://xkcd.com/949/
- Twirrim 10y agoEven before Snowball was launched the import/export team was joking about UPS trucks full of snowballs, both within the team, and then with management. I guess management found out there was actual customer demand for it.
- jasode 10y agoAs other commenters noted, it's fascinating that no matter how advanced the networking technology progresses, we'll always have a variation of "sneakernet"[1] to bypass the limitations of the network. The sneakernet just evolves from floppies to 45-foot shipping containers. If humans later colonize Mars and want to have the full 50-terabytes copy of Wikipedia in the biosphere, it's faster to send some harddrives as a rocket payload on a 6 month journey rather than try to transfer it via the 32kbps uplink[2] which would take ~500 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet [2] http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communicationwithearth/data/ http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communicationwithearth/data...
- zeristor 10y agoOr use X-ray communications: http://www.space.com/34824-nasa-x-ray-tech-deep-space-communication.html http://www.space.com/34824-nasa-x-ray-tech-deep-space-commun... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063277
- jasode 10y agoEven with x-rays theoretically providing a future 1 Gbps link to Mars, the underlying issue is that the growth of data vastly outpaces the advancements in speed technologies. In other words, by the time x-ray communication is a reality to the Mars colony, we'd want to copy 50-petabytes (~15 years transfer[1]) or 50-exabytes (~15000 years transfer). The 6-month rocket journey is still faster than those scenarios. [1]http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(50*10%5E15)+%2F+((1*10%5E9)%2F10)+%2F+(24*60*60)+%2F+365.25 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(50*10%5E15)+%2F+((1*10...
- visarga 10y agoMultiple laser beams? That would scale.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
- andrelaszlo 10y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. p. 57.
- theregoesjohn 10y agoJust what I came to the comments for. Thank you.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MichaelApproved 10y agoIn the same vein, a South African carrier pigeon was faster than a popular ADSL solution in 2009. It carried a 4GB memory stick 60 miles in about an hour. It took them another hour to upload the data to their system. The ADSL solution only completed 4% of the transfer, in the same amount of time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm It was an obvious publicity stunt trying to bring attention to the slow connection speeds but it does illustrate this issue well.
- mojoe 10y agoNever underestimate the street value either. I wonder if they have an armed escort for this truck -- the hardware must cost on the order of 10-20 million, and the data itself could be worth many multiples of that. Could make a great heist movie.
- raverbashing 10y agoI wonder how long it takes to load all the data in the truck (over 10GbE? or are there better ways?)
- ceejayoz 10y agoRight there in the article. > Each Snowmobile includes a network cable connected to a high-speed switch capable of supporting 1 Tb/second of data transfer spread across multiple 40 Gb/second connections. Assuming that your existing network can transfer data at that rate, you can fill a Snowmobile in about 10 days.
- onde2rock 10y agoAny idea on the type of link they are using to connect to the containers ? If they fill the thing in 30 days, that average to 40 Go/s, way faster than 10gbe or Fibre Channel.
- ceejayoz 10y ago> Each Snowmobile includes a network cable connected to a high-speed switch capable of supporting 1 Tb/second of data transfer spread across multiple 40 Gb/second connections. Assuming that your existing network can transfer data at that rate, you can fill a Snowmobile in about 10 days.
- robbiemitchell 10y agoA surprising number of comments are questions that are answered explicitly in the article. PSA: consume the full content before you comment on the content.
- dkresge 10y ago350KW seems a bit high for something that should effectively be an append-only file system. I would have expected 95% of the trailer to be in standby at any point in time.
- bArray 10y agoYeah, thought that number was a bit high. Maybe there's something else to it?
- daveloyall 10y agoEncryption.
- mountaineer22 10y agoAir Conditioning.
- tyingq 10y agoChillers: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/img_20161130_102916.jpg https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/img_201...
- masklinn 10y ago100PB storage and a total network capacity of 1TB/s across multiple 40GB/s links means pretty serious hardware, before even considering the security and video surveillance systems.
- brianwawok 10y agoUnless my math is wrong, storing 100PB in S3 is something like $2,750,000 per month. Then what happens in 5 years if local storage cost dropped by a factor of 10, but S3 cost did not drop? Big risk, no?
- noahdesu 10y agoI suspect that Amazon will not only be dropping prices, but will be adding new ways to store data with variable pricing (e.g. new tiers as well as reduced redundancy). Not to mention that if you have 100PB in AWS you might get preferential pricing? Google recently increased their spread and now have 4 tiers. There is also an interesting article about Glacier storage and pricing here https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/ https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd....
- brianwawok 10y agoYou suspect, but you don't know. Most people have suspected that AWS bandwidth costs would go down.. but by and large, they have held steady for 5+ years.
- res0nat0r 10y agoYour standalone 4TB Western Digital hard drive isn't going to give you 99.999999999% durability and replicate your data across multiple datacenters. .03/GB is still insanely cheap IMO.
- brianwawok 10y agoPeople with 100 PB are not using 4 TB Western Digital drives in solo mode. They likely have multiple racks of high performance storage, likely in multiple data centers.
- jrgifford 10y agoIt won't just be S3, it could be stored in Glacier. Considering AWS just cut list price for both of those, this makes sense.
- cyphreak 10y agoSo this is absolutely a honeypot then, right? There's no way to verify that this truck full of my corp's valuable data isn't stopped somewhere along the way and cloned and then driven to NSA or something.
- tyingq 10y agoYou're putting it in the truck with the intention of shipping it to Amazon to load it onto their infrastructure. If you don't trust Amazon with your data, the truck isn't unique in any way...they can clone your data at their data center too.
- cyphreak 10y agoWell that's what I'm saying. I mean I guess that rabbit hole goes all the way, even if Amazon brought their machines to me, there's still not a guarantee that it won't be stolen somehow.
- orf 10y agoWhoever said "The Internet is not a truck"? Seems like this blurs the lines a bit :)
- jasoncchild 10y agohttps://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
- patrickg_zill 10y agoWhile I admit that there may be customer demand for this, even if there is not, Amazon has certainly made a great marketing message.
- chinathrow 10y agoThere is: DigitalGlobe is/was using it.
- OJFord 10y agoEvery blog post should have a Lego visualisation like this.
- hackcrafter 10y agoAgreed! But for the love of LEGO, after all that effort to make great custom scenes, they could have used a better camera! Those photos look like they were taken with a poorly focusing cheap smartphone.
- notacoward 10y agoNow this is real persistent container storage. ;) And persistent it will be, because even at 1Tb/s it will take you over a week to load the data onto it. The bandwidth while in transit is phenomenal, but before that it will be sitting at your DC's loading dock for quite a while.
- bluedino 10y ago>> We needed a solution that could move our 100 PB archive but could not find one until now with AWS Snowmobile. Around this time last year BackBlaze had 200PB of customer backups. They described storing it on 54,675 hard drives across 1,215 Storage Pods So imagine 600 storage pods or half of BackBlaze's entire operation, for just one customer. Insane.
- jjagylstor 10y agoSo- suppose we could move that same 100 PB in a standard 24" cube FedEx box, collecting the data in less than a week and using only two 110v power connections. Would that be interesting? Oh, and it takes less than a single rack of gear.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]