Amazon Cloud Uses FedEx to Ship Data

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
How do you get terabytes of data uploaded to Amazon’s cloud storage? You ship it FedEx. Amazon even provides an online calculator to help you decide if it is cheaper to ship via FedEx or uploading over the internet.

What is this new technology, you may ask? It's called FedEx. For large amounts of data, terabytes, it could actually take weeks to upload to Amazon's servers over the Internet. So Amazon is now letting customers put a storage device in the mail and Amazon will take care of the data transfer within its own high-speed internal network.
Click to expand...
 
You must ship your storage device with its power supply and interface cables. Without these we can't transfer your data and will return your device."
Click to expand...

They can't find a sata, USB or firewire cable lying around? lol
 
aardvark sandwich said:
They can't find a sata, USB or firewire cable lying around? lol
Click to expand...
Depending on how many customers they have that use the FedEx option, they might not have enough 'spares'. I could see companies shipping 20+ drives to them.

Plus, it seems I've got a different USB cable for each device in this house. :mad:
 
aardvark sandwich said:
They can't find a sata, USB or firewire cable lying around? lol
Click to expand...
They had better! But I think they are referring to customers using hard drives mounted in an enclosure. The policy makes sense in this case. While you or I wouldn't have much of a problem copying data to a bare drive with no enclosure, I don't see a company doing that with valuable data, at least not when shipping the devices to a third party.
 
Talk about high latency though....

If you ship enough harddrives, the bandwidth is probably quite high.
 
Flat charge per storage device plus an hourly charge for time to transfer data. No storage device over 4TB. Finally, "AWS is not responsible for damages associated with loss or inadvertent disclosure of data."

For anyone using this service, please state your company name so I never do business with you again. No responsibility for the data leaking out ... are you kidding me? :confused::eek::mad:
 
Most people aren't going to store sensitive data with Amazon S3, so data leaks aren't ordinarily that big a deal.
 
jcollett said:
Flat charge per storage device plus an hourly charge for time to transfer data. No storage device over 4TB. Finally, "AWS is not responsible for damages associated with loss or inadvertent disclosure of data."

For anyone using this service, please state your company name so I never do business with you again. No responsibility for the data leaking out ... are you kidding me? :confused::eek::mad:
Click to expand...

Netflix just recently switched to using AWS.
 
phide said:
Most people aren't going to store sensitive data with Amazon S3, so data leaks aren't ordinarily that big a deal.
Click to expand...
This. Plus, would drives in transit not be the responsibility of the transporter?

ShadowStriker said:
So, who wants to bet that someone's gonna put a worm on a hard drive and send it in?
Click to expand...
Go ahead and upload a worm into your DropBox. I'll let you know when I see it in mine. :)
 
ShadowStriker said:
So, who wants to bet that someone's gonna put a worm on a hard drive and send it in?
Click to expand...

Why would someone want to put a worm on their own virtual machine? Moreso, why would anyone mail a HDD to do that when you can do it in a second over the internet?
 
Nemesis999 said:
Why would someone want to put a worm on their own virtual machine? Moreso, why would anyone mail a HDD to do that when you can do it in a second over the internet?
Click to expand...
Well, someone could claim they were an HP admin and send a hard drive over. I would think it would be easier to get the credentials for the Cloud than the steps you would have to go through for Amazon to accept your mail.
 
srangara said:
Well, someone could claim they were an HP admin and send a hard drive over. I would think it would be easier to get the credentials for the Cloud than the steps you would have to go through for Amazon to accept your mail.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking you're going to need credentials anyway. I somehow doubt they're just going to accept a harddrive mailed to them. Most likely you get some kind of unique key through your Amazon account to tag our box with.
 
Nemesis999 said:
I'm thinking you're going to need credentials anyway. I somehow doubt they're just going to accept a harddrive mailed to them. Most likely you get some kind of unique key through your Amazon account to tag our box with.
Click to expand...
Yes, that's what I meant. In addition to needing the ID and password anyway (to get that key) you would probably need to provide additional details.
 
I can understand this "feature" for when you have a large amount of data. But what gets me is why are they charging you money to upload data over the internet to your own account?
 
Exavior said:
I can understand this "feature" for when you have a large amount of data. But what gets me is why are they charging you money to upload data over the internet to your own account?
Click to expand...
They charge both for storage and for data transfer (both ways) but only between the S3 site and external sites. If you have an EC2 application, there is no charge for it to transfer data to or from the S3 site (as long as those accounts are in the same geographic region).

So, once you have loaded your data onto the storage server (S3), your web application (EC2) can use it without incurring any data transfer fees.

The cost isn't that onerous anyway: a flat $1 per 10 GB transferred in; $1.50 for the first 10 TB transferred out and the rate goes down from there. Those costs basically pay for the hardware to hold your stuff while the monthly storage costs pay for the maintenance.

Full pricing details:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top