In 2009, Amazon AMZN 102,05 -3,40 -3,22% created a service which allowed you send them your own hard disk, and have the data from it imported into their cloud. Snowball, the updated service Amazon provides a hard drive for you to fill, then ship to them for cloud import. This solution allows for uploads in the order of 10TB or more.
You can visit the AWS Snowball page, and place an order at $200. The order creates a task, which causes Amazon to ship a Snowball device to you. The Snowball provides a robust shippable unit with an E-Ink label (a re-purposed Kindle), capable of withstanding a 6G jolt. Inside the box is up to 50TB of hard disk storage and a 10GB/s network connection.
Once you’ve copied the data, the job completes, and the E-Ink display changes to show a new shipping address. Uploading the data to the cloud starts when connected to Amazon’s datacenter. Once complete, Amazon then sanitises the device to NIST standards, meaning that Amazon can reuse it for the next task.
