screenshot_844
Bill Vass of Amazon Web Services unveils the Amazon Snowball this morning. (Via webcast)

Amazon Web Services this morning announced a new way for its customers to get large amounts of data into the cloud, unveiling a new storage appliance called “Snowball” that can be shipped directly to the company for uploading to AWS servers.

screenshot_846It comes with an embedded E Ink shipping label — a Kindle screen — that automatically sets itself to ship to the customer and, after the data is loaded, ship back to Amazon Web Services.

“It knows where it’s going and it just sets the label for you,” said Bill Vass, the vice president of engineering for Amazon Web Services, announcing the new appliance at the Amazon re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

Amazon Snowball
Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, announces the Snowball service today.

Each device can hold up to 50 terabytes of data. The Snowball service will cost $200 per job, he said. The company says the secure enclosure, coupled with data encryption, will protect customer data.

It’s the latest example of Amazon using its experience in logistics and its technical savvy to experiment with new ways of solving problems. The company is competing against Microsoft, Google and other cloud rivals not only for business from startups and developers but increasingly for business from large corporate customers.

Also this morning, Amazon Web Services announced a preview of QuickSight, a new business intelligence and data visualization tool that promises to quickly analyze corporate data and present results in dashboards that can be easily shared across the business.

The new service positions Amazon as a challenger to Microsoft, IBM, SAP and others in the lucrative market for business intelligence and data visualization.

Andy Jassy, the Amazon Web Services senior vice president, listed Seattle-based Tableau Software as one of the partners that will take advantage of the service. He said Amazon will offer QuickSight at 1/10th the cost of existing data visualization services.

QuickSight was reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal under the code name “Space Needle.”

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