This Amazon suitcase will courier 50TB to the cloud

Amazon Web Services has revealed a new rented and couriered device that physically migrates data from on-premises hardware to the public cloud.

Amazon senior vice president of web services Andy Jassy launched the new Snowball service in front of 19,000 attendees at the vendor's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

"Even for companies that have pretty good connections, it's very unlikely you want to saturate the network with moving data to AWS," said Jassy, adding that it would take 100 days to move 100TB of data to the cloud even if 10 percent of bandwidth was dedicated from a 100Mbps corporate network.

"That's why people say: never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx truck."

AWS vice president of engineering Bill Vass then showed the crowd a tamper-proof, shock-proof device that looks like a large briefcase. The 50TB storage devices, lent out by AWS, are delivered to the customer's premises with ten days to copy the data on.

The Snowball is "rugged enough to withstand a 6G jolt" and weighs 23kg. The device has an external electronic ink display panel, which Sassy described as "a Kindle", that dynamically changes the delivery address for the courier.

The self-contained units have a 10GB network connection for fast data transfer, and the data is encrypted on-the-fly as it is copied onto the device.

The Snowball units are then sent back by the customer for AWS staff to decrypt the data and "copy it to the S3 bucket(s) that you specified when you made your request", according to an AWS blog post.

The company stated that the service is ideal for customers that need to move more than 10TB of data to the cloud.

The Snowball service has a "usage charge of $200 per job" that excludes shipping. The offering is available initially in the USA only for migrations into the US Standard and US West (Oregon) AWS regions. Australian availability is currently unknown.

"It's much more cost effective than what you otherwise might to do move that much data," Jassy said at a press conference.

The journalist travelled to AWS re:Invent as a guest of Amazon Web Services.