AWS launches 80TB 'cloud suitcase' in Australia

Amazon Web Services has announced that its physical data migration device Snowball is now available in Australia.

Snowball, first debuted at the vendor's re:Invent conference last November, is a rented device that physically migrates data from on-premises hardware to the AWS public cloud.

AWS chief security information officer Stephen Schmidt said Wednesday morning at AWS Summit Sydney that Sydney, to serve the Asia-Pacific, and Dublin, to serve the European Union, have opened as the first Snowball reception centres outside North America.

The geographic expansion came simultaneously as the release of a new 80TB Snowball device, up from the 50TB capacity released last year. Sydney and Ireland will only accept the new 80TB model for processing.

Schmidt told the packed crowd at the Hordern Pavilion that his company is seeking to "increase the awareness and delivery" of Snowball internationally.

"We're committed to having Snowball available in every AWS region by the end of 2016," he said.

The 23-kg Snowball, which looks like a hard suitcase, is "rugged enough to withstand a 6G jolt" and has a 10GB network connection. The rental service includes couriering of the appliance to and from the data source.

Data transfer acceleration: money back guarantee

The cloud giant also launched the Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration service. The offering attempts to speed up data uploads by utilising Amazon edge - a 50-location network that was previously reserved for the Amazon CloudFront content delivery service.

Schmidt said that even the best technology could not overcome physics and the tyranny of distance: "We've provided tools in the past to accelerate [data movement] as much as we can, through multi-part uploads. But for very large files that need to move long distances, this can still be very challenging."

However, using a reserved network - currently used primarily for downloading content - for mass data uploads resulted in a 300 percent improvement in transfer speeds "for most use-cases".

Schmidt expressed AWS' confidence in the acceleration with a satisfaction guarantee.

"If you try out our transfer acceleration service and it's not faster than your standard upload, you don't pay for it," he said at the Sydney conference.

Partners, customers and potential customers from around Australia are attending the AWS Summit Wednesday and Thursday in inner city Sydney.