Cloud companies want your data center business so badly they’re willing to actually come over and pick it up.
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have helped customers ship hard drives full of data to their cloud servers for several years, and Google now offers a similar service called Transfer Appliance. It’s a storage server designed for standard server racks that can accommodate either 100TB or 480TB of data (or 200TB or 1PB of compressed data) depending on the model you choose.
For $300, Google will send you the 100TB appliance, let you fill it with your data, and arrange to have it shipped back to a Google data center via FedEx. If you’ve got a lot of data destined for Google’s cloud, expect to pay $1,800 for the 480TB version. The service is U.S.-only for the moment.
Data might be just a collection of bits and bytes, but as any database manager will tell you, data has gravity. With the explosion in data generated by the mobile computing and social media revolutions, companies are amassing tons of data stored on cheap hardware.
But moving that data can be a challenge. Networking speeds are what they are: even if you have a super fast gigabit-per-second network coming into your company, it could take 12 days to move 100TBs of data over that network to Google’s servers, it said. That’s why AWS and Microsoft have offered physical transfer options for their customers for a long time, and Google’s announcement is a sign (a late one, of course) that it is seeing cloud business from larger companies with lots of data.
But until a multicolored Google semi truck starts rolling out to data centers, bumping heads with Amazon’s Snowmobile, the Transfer Appliances will have to do.
