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One thing I do consider a real value add for AWS Glacier though has been their native support for offline media import/export. Ie., you can just send them a har
by xoa 8y ago
One thing I do consider a real value add for AWS Glacier though has been their native support for offline media import/export. Ie., you can just send them a hard drive of your own for data load, and pay to get a hard drive back out as well. As gigabit (or faster) class WAN slowly spreads this will someday become unnecessary, but right now in many, many places a company could easily have terabytes to backup but 10/1 ADSL as their best available connection. Even with faster connections, aggressive data caps are sadly not infrequent. Whether it's for initial load, ongoing use or faster recovery, sometimes there is still nothing like a multi-TB drive or two in the mail.
There are 3rd parties that will do it for you (Iron Mountain is at least one) but that's an extra cost and Google takes no responsibility for it. I assume this is an example of a place where Amazon is able to leverage its wholistic business, with a Cloud service that can also take advantage of their physical logistics system. Google's service here is quite significantly cheaper and has some nice features though, but even if it's not worth a $4/$1.23 premium for Amazon I could definitely see continuing to pay Amazon some premium ($2 vs $1.23 say) for that alone anywhere with limited high speed WAN availability.
- deftnerd 8y agoBackblaze also offers that option. You can mail them up to 8tb on an external HD and have it loaded into their system for $190, up to 256gb on a USB stick for $100. [1] You can also request a "B2 Fireball" [2] from them. It's basically a small array that they mail to you for $550 with 70tb of storage. You fill it up and send it back to them within the month, and they'll load the data into your account. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html (Bottom of the page) [2] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball...
- xoa 8y agoFor comparison, Amazon supports up to 16TB in their basic service, with an $80 flat handling fee per storage device and then $2.50 per data loading hour. Since they support 2.5"/3.5" SATA and external eSATA & USB 2/3.0 interfaces and it's a pure sequential transfer, it's not much trouble to get at least close to maximum sequential, which even for decent spinning rust should allow a good half TB an hour at least. I've never tried an SSD so I'm not sure if they can saturate 6 Gbps, but as even a 32 hour transfer of 16TB would only be another +$80 it may not be generally relevant anyway. Amazon's equivalent to B2 Fireball is "AWS Snowball" (amusingly enough, not sure if there is a bit of fun name riffing between the two here), which is a service fee of $200/50TB and $250/80TB device, any onsite days after the first 10 at $15/day. It's interesting how the pricing mix is on this feature though. Amazon offers lower potential ingress pricing depending on your use, though notably if you kept the Snowball a whole month the pricing would get very close to the Fireball (+20 days @$15/day brings the price to $500/$550 respectively, though the former with 20TB less and the latter with 10TB more). Backblaze and Google are both much cheaper to get data out of though, Amazon's Glacier and descendent services remain very much deep freeze focused.
- rob-olmos 8y agoWhat's the shipping costs on a Snowball or other appliances?
- boulos 8y agoDisclosure: I work on Google Cloud. We also have a Transfer Appliance [1], that comes in two sizes (100T and just under 500T). We don’t currently support shipping one filled up with your data for recovery/export though. [1] https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance/ https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance/