The SneakerNet was a way to move data around companies before high bandwidth network links. Data would be copied to a floppy disk, and then physically walked in your sneakers to reach its final destination.
Google Google Inc. 108,22 -0,15 -0,14% announced yesterday the SneakerNet for the Cloud Era. This again brings to mind the quote “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” The challenge with migrating big data to the cloud, is just that it’s big. There is a lot of it. Moving it takes time. Even with high bandwidth links it takes a while to move that data across the network. Google includes a table of transfer times in their blog post that indicates 10 Petabytes of data would take 34 years to transfer over a 100Mb/s link. This drops to 3 years over a 1Gb/s link. And only 124 days on a 10Gb/s link.
Google’s answer is the Transfer Appliance. It comes in two form factors, 480TB in a 4U appliance, or 100TB in a 2U appliance. The device fits in a 19″ rack in the data centre, and couples to the network. You then copy data in to the device, compressing, encrypting and storing it. The device connects to the network via 1Gb/s copper, 10Gb/s copper or fiber connections. It can also bond multiple interfaces together to increase the bandwidth, although Google doesn’t state how many interfaces are in the appliance.
You ship the appliance back to Google when it is full. The data is expanded to cloud storage once the device is installed in Google’s data centre. At this point you can then move your data to its final destination.
You can rent the smaller appliance for $300, with FedEx shipping costs extra (Google estimate $500), or the larger appliance for $1800 (estimated shipping for this unit is $900). Google notes that the appliance is not HIPPA compliant. You might not be able to migrate all your data this way.
This is a small price to pay to reduce the time taken to transfer data to the cloud by months or years. Syncing the changes made after you have remove the Google Transfer Appliance from the network. This will also take some time, so don’t forget to include that in the project plans.
Amazon AMZN 102,05 -3,40 -3,22% also offer a similar package for getting data into their cloud, their Snowball appliance. And for larger transfers, the Snowmobile. SneakerNet lives!
