Amazon Snowmobile Bringing Data Direct To Your Door
The American senator Ted Stevens said, in 2006, that the Internet is not something that you can just dump something on because “it’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” Amazon Snowmobile disagree.
Well, a lot has changed since 2006. Now the Internet, while not actually a truck, can and is being driven around in a big truck. In fact, Amazon wants to drive the Internet right up to your front door. They will offer you much better upload speeds.
The Amazon snowmobile is a large truck that is acting as a mobile data centre. Amazon is driving around a shipping container that holds the mobile data centre that holds upwards of 100 petabytes of information.
As it turns out, there is actually no better way to upload 100 petabytes of data. If you want to upload that much data at that much speed. Then you literally have to take it out for a spin and drive around at 75mph.
Amazon Snowmobile Paving The Way For Data Storage
The Amazon Snowmobile is the successor of their 2015 project, the Snowball. The Snowball was a packaged hard drive that could store upwards of 50 tb of data. They would then be passed onto customers who were in need of uploading large amounts of data by Amazon. The Snowball can now store about 80 tb, and uses a Kindle screen on the outside in order to skip the need for having pre-printed postage labels.
The Amazon Snowmobile, as well as the Snowball, are services that the company has created. They are marketing to developers who want to use the Amazon cloud computing service, AWS. But do not have the spare time needed to upload the large amounts of data needed.
These mobile data centres are Amazon’s twist on an old concept of physically transporting stored media to send large files around workplaces, often by USB flash drives or portable hard drives.