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Introducing Transfer Appliance: Sneakernet for the cloud era

95 points| nealmueller | 8 years ago |cloudplatform.googleblog.com

47 comments

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[+] bpicolo|8 years ago|reply
To be fair, AWS launched a much, much larger analogue to AWS Snowball. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
[+] Jyaif|8 years ago|reply
"Snowmobile uses multiple layers of security designed to protect your data including dedicated security personnel, GPS tracking, alarm monitoring, 24/7 video surveillance, and an optional escort security vehicle"

The data is encrypted, so that part is really just to impress the commoner.

[+] nealmueller|8 years ago|reply
Hahaha, you got me there. Althought, to be fair, Snowmobile is an entirely different product category. Same problem, different scale of solution. It's like Starbucks coming out with a truck solution, when all you wanted was a Venti.
[+] jrowley|8 years ago|reply
This a bit tangental but I like the graphs/visualizations they used in this ad. Easy to read and interrupt
[+] boulos|8 years ago|reply
Agreed! The diagram [1] is super handy, and lets me reiterate why we waited to so long to do this: 10 Gbps of peering is just not that rare (and you probably want it for updates, etc. anyway). Even as you get to the petabyte range, being able to just hit "Go" and then do differential updates is so valuable that you really have to be talking about lots of Petabytes in a location where (or reason why) you can't get 10Gbps plus of peering.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but didn't work on this)

[1] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SnFabcStXhM/WW4SEhj6adI/AAAAAAAAE...

[+] tpetry|8 years ago|reply
The ability to export data from GCP to maybe your own datacenter is really missing.
[+] nealmueller|8 years ago|reply
Good idea, thanks for the suggestion. It does seem more open for the appliance to ship data to the cloud and also the reverse. The interest is interesting, and I'll definitely feed that back.
[+] jdubs|8 years ago|reply
Hotel California model.
[+] johansch|8 years ago|reply
In the same theme: moving very large amounts of data between GC and AWS, in either direction. I wonder what it would take for them to make this cost zero. Legislation?

It likely wouldn't be very expensive to get a very high-capacity fiber connection going between GC/AWS datacenters in relative physical proximity.

Not expressing a particular/immediate personal need here, just noting that this could help keep the lock-in factor down and level of competition up.

[+] twakefield|8 years ago|reply
"Like many organizations we talk to, you probably have large amounts of data that you want to use to train machine learning models."

I understand's Google's bias here but doesn't it usually make more sense to bring the programs/models to where the data already is?

[+] btian|8 years ago|reply
GCP has proprietary machine learning accelerator hardware that you can't buy.
[+] bpicolo|8 years ago|reply
The problem isn't the programs, it's the hardware. GCP has specialized / scalable hardware to build models on.
[+] zeroxfe|8 years ago|reply
It is extremely expensive to setup and maintain infrastructure to process big data, especially when you get into the petabytes.
[+] binaryblitz|8 years ago|reply
$300 for a 100TB rackable drive? Can I just keep it instead?
[+] canes123456|8 years ago|reply
Obviously not. Rent a car for a week seems cheap. Can I keep it forever?
[+] nealmueller|8 years ago|reply
The other comments here are correct. The standard model for these appliances is a rental model. Please talk to a GCP seller.
[+] Veratyr|8 years ago|reply
It seems to pretty clearly be a rental, so no...
[+] wtvanhest|8 years ago|reply
Anyone know how to backup 1tbyte worth of images in google or AWS? My ISP throttles my upload time. I'm interested in doing it at a lower price point than $500. Is that possible?
[+] theDoug|8 years ago|reply
I've happily used Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com/) to get a lot of things into Drive and GCP. You can control your network rate to still get the files uploaded but over a longer time-span below your ISP's throttling.

(Disclosure: I work on GCP but this is a personal, not professional, endorsement)

[+] tehlike|8 years ago|reply
Become a visitor to one of thr tech companies, and use their wifi.
[+] peterjlee|8 years ago|reply
So a Hooli Box?
[+] compuguy|8 years ago|reply
Hooli Box compresses and stores data. This is just used to transfer data to GCP.
[+] CaliforniaKarl|8 years ago|reply
Awwwww, it's too bad this can't be used to get stuff directly into Drive.
[+] nealmueller|8 years ago|reply
Good idea, thanks for the suggestion. The interest is interesting, and I'll definitely feed that back. I felt the pain recently myself when I moved all my photos and videos to Google Photos and I wished I had one of these.
[+] Poiesis|8 years ago|reply
Anyone know what's inside the box?
[+] westernmostcoy|8 years ago|reply
Article title is actually "Introducing Transfer Appliance: Sneakernet for the cloud era", can someone change how it's presented here? This was not a good improvised title.
[+] sctb|8 years ago|reply
Yes, thank you. We've updated the title from “Google launches a larger analogue to AWS Snowball”.