Brian @ Wongside

Note: This is Part II of my post/article on a new service from Amazon Web Services. If you didn’t read it, you should go back to yesterday’s post and read the introduction.

The first time I heard of something like this (transferring data via courier/mail rather than over the Internet because it was faster) was back when I lived in SLO. A guy I knew at church worked for a visual effects company that happened to be working on King Kong. As you may recall, most of the effects were done by Weta in New Zealand. Well, Weta needed to offload some of the digital footage to my friend’s company in Santa Maria. They originally intended to send it over the Internet, but that would have been too slow. So instead they made him drive to LA. Huh?

It seemed crazy to me at the time that they’d make him drive the ~6 hours round trip to LA just to pick up the footage. But in the end it really was quicker for them to send the footage to LA via some high speed optical method, and then have my friend drive down to LA to pick up the hard drive. Once in possession of the fully loaded hard drive (or drives), he hopped back in his car to Santa Maria, and then unloaded the hard drives when he got to the office. It proved much more expedient than waiting days for the files to download.

In any case, we’ll see what this does to AWS and S3. It might revolutionize storage; it might change the way companies like SmugMug do business. It’ll be a heck of a lot faster for companies to perform initial backups of data to S3 with their terabytes of data. After that, they can do their incremental backups over the Internet like everyone else. And heck if they have large incrementals, companies could still send update hard drives in the mail.

I wonder if Amazon will eventually accept a sort of “drop shipped” arrangement so that providers built on AWS like Jungle Disk or SmugMug can have their customers mail drives into Amazon, and have their data loaded into the service of choice.

On the enterprise side, can you imagine a corporation sending a shipment of these or these with multi-terabytes worth of data? If you sent over two of those Sun storage boxes, that could be 96 TB of data. Based on the calculations above, that could be 13.1 days via the mail, or 3 years via the Internet. Crazy! What an invaluable savings!

I doubt this is going to be an economic, or business game-changer. (Though I could be wrong, and it wouldn’t be the first time.) But I definitely think it will have an effect–not only on AWS and their ability to cater to customers with massive amounts of data, but also on the entire cloud-computing ecosystem.