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Amazon To Offer Sneakernet Services: Data Upload By Mail
blueshift_1 writes: If you have 50TB of data that you'd like to put on the S3 cloud, Amazon is releasing Snowball. It's basically a large grey box full of hard drives that Amazon will mail to you. Simply upload your files and mail it back — they will upload it for you. For $200 + shipping, it's at a pretty reasonable price point if you're tired of hosting your data and want to try and push that to AWS. ("Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -Tanenbaum, Andrew S.)
It's nice they've got an official box and all, but the service to send disks to Amazon has been there for a while (as a beta program).
Here is a blog post from 2009 explaining the service.
Of course, a nice official controlled and encrytped box is a far tidier way of doing things!
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Encrypt it?
Why would you store valuable data in plain text on a cloud service?
The boxes in which these hard drives ship will be obvious that they're from Amazon. It's an invitation to thieves to steal the boxes and the data on the hard drives. I can't understand why ANYONE would ship data of any value in this manner.
The data is encrypted by the tool that copies data to the device. It doesn't seem like it would take too many thefts before UPS/FedEx roots out their thieving employees.
In the beginning, networking was developed so that folks wouldn't have to shuttle data back and forth via locomotion.
Now, we have so much data and fast bandwidth is so expensive, that transferring data to another site physically is actually a consideration.
The boxes in which these hard drives ship will be obvious that they're from Amazon. It's an invitation to thieves to steal the boxes and the data on the hard drives. I can't understand why ANYONE would ship data of any value in this manner.
It's not like their shipping you bare OEM drives with some air puffs. The box is a self contained appliance. I'd be very surprised if the copy to the drives in the box didn't leave the data encrypted, it'd be foolish of Amazon to do it any other way
And yes, excerpted directly from the service web page found at https://aws.amazon.com/importe...
'Once it arrives, attach the appliance to your local network, download and run the Snowball client to establish a connection, and then use the client to select the file directories that you want to transfer to the appliance. The client will then encrypt and transfer the files to the appliance at high speed.'
So unless the client is absolute crap, it's a pretty good solution
I can't understand [...]
And that should be your cue not to post, and think for a moment. If you have sensitive data, you use encryption.
Every end has half a stick.
Do they load the box and send it back to you when you're moving to another service or returning to self-hosting?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I live in third world USA
The send your own disk service depended on using truecrypt. WIth no support for truecrypt due to the epic meltdown, plus the recently announced windows kernel driver bug in the windows version of truecrypt allowing people to own you, AWS has wanted to migrate away from using truecrypt containers. That, plus there's a rational limit to the size of devices you can send them by mail that normal people can purchase. Switching to their own portable appliance allows bigger capacities and controlling the security environment. Why amazon still hasn't put out new guidance regarding the disk service and truecrypt is pretty serious though. Not like they have great options for truecrypt compatible multiOS apps (Veracrypt patched, but CipherShed has gone silent)
Unless they really screw up the encryption(in which case the value of some of the data being transported might be worthwhile); these things seem like they'd actually be pretty dubious theft options. Even new, 50TB worth of consumer grade disk(I assume that Amazon is using some redundancy; but probably isn't splurging on SAS or fancy-enterprise-SATA for disks that will spend most of their life with Fedex, not actually spinning) isn't actually all that valuable(4TB drives are ~$150 retail, 6TB ~$250) and 'used' is not a happy word when trying to sell a hard drive. Plus it's essentially certain that Amazon has every serial number, MAC address, etc. of every component in the box on record, so you are SOL if anyone ever checks.
It also wouldn't be too surprising if the case has some level of active anti-theft reporting. Given that sub-$100 cellphones have GPS, a cell modem, one or more accelerometers, and are built on SoCs with enough GPIO to connect a bunch of tamper switches/sensors to; it wouldn't be particularly impractical for the box to report its location, integrity, orientation, and vibration levels every 30 seconds for the entire trip. Not impossible to defeat; but you'd need to nab it in an area of no service and silence it(by force or RF-blocking container) before moving it elsewhere.
I'd certainly encrypt my data carefully before consigning it to either the post or the internet; but I'd be surprised if hitting these boxes would be a good risk/reward for postal employees(though I know I'd like a look at what is inside, a nice rugged network attached storage module is likely to be a neat piece of gear).
download and run the Snowball client. Has anybody done this ? I suspect that it is a MS Windows executable, does it run under Wine ?
There are versions for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Amazon supports the Snowball Client for Ubuntu 12+ and RHEL 6+, but no doubt it can run on other systems. https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/tools/
Also, as per this link, they're working on chain-of-custody tracking using GPS. Amazon has already considered the possibility of theft and it doesn't seem likely to be an issue.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
If you have 50TB of data that you'd like to put on the S3 cloud, Amazon is releasing Snowball.
I don't, therefore it isn't.
Garry Knight
Europe should mail its cultural treasures to Amazon lest they be destroyed by their new Arab overlords.
Stop raining on everyone's parade! It's obviously an NSA operation, the software only works with Windows ME or Vista, and every time someone uses it an "SJW" is born.
The presence of backdoor keys for NSA warrant free decryption seems a given. But that would seem to be a given for all major cloud storage services, so it may not even be needed for the Snowball device itself. And there are quite a few situations where local bandwidth costs or data center replication would justify transferring this material to Amazon: their AWS S3 storage has proven far more reliable, and scalable, than many local storage solutions.
did you seriously just call copying files to a hard drive 'upload'? *facepalm*
Even if you don't have sensitive data you should consider encrypting, as it means encrypted data looks less "interesting" if it's the norm.
"Snowball"? That is juvenile and utterly disgusting.
I got computer time to process a 200MB dataset. But the internet bandwidth was still measured in kilobaud then. So we loaded up a disk and flew to the computer. Multiply everything by a million 20 years later.
What's this station wagon you talk about?
do I have to give the box back and just keep the disks ? I dont have 50tb of data but no doubt my porn collection can expand to fill it.
Exactly. If it needs to be encrypted, one should encrypt it locally and then copy it to the Amazon box (which will encrypt again, but not really needed).
Once the data is copied to the cloud, it will be encrypted based on the original offline encryption done on the local box.
Otherwise, if it will be stored in clear text in the S3 cloud, you really don't need to bother encrypting it in transit via FedEx/UPS. If you are afraid of data tampering, then again, the data should be encrypted at rest in the cloud still.
The shipping companies deal with thousands of Amazon boxes a day and they all pretty much look alike. The box they ship it in is probably going to be less decorated than their usual boxes. The only way the driver knows it is special is that it is addressed to a business and he throws his back out picking the damn thing up (come on, at 50TB that is still a good number of harddrives + appliance). But considering that you can get drives in bulk shipped, it will be just another day on the job.
Business is the primary customer, so it isn't like it will be dropped off on the porch and left.
I can't wait for the price on this to come down. I did the calculation and to backup our DAS it will be almost $600, not to mention the cost of hosting it from that point forward in S3. The Kindle as a shipping label elicited a hearty guffaw, however.
Anyone see this as a way to infiltrate a network?
I mean, the only way to get data into and out of it is a 10gE connection, to which you need to use a client to connect to it. So it's entirely possible for the OS that's running on it (presumably it's just an x86 based PC with a lot of disk) to surreptitiously monitor, scan and potentially plant malware on your network. Sure, SOME people will do data precautions and firewalling, but considering the PC running the client needs access to the data AND access to the snowball, it seems like most people would probably just hook it up to a spare network port.
While I'm sure Amazon probably wants to ensure those things are clean, I'm not so sure if anything can be implanted in them along the way...
I suspect after the first couple of people do that, it will become $200 + $5000 deposit to be credited to your AWS account when they get the thing back.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Let us know when they add a method for bulk export/import of S3 files WITH their metadata.
I can't wait for a Synology plugin app that supports this. I'd much rather have my NAS push the data to the snowball than have it traverse the network twice.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Read the article, there is no box involved, it's a big plastic things with a kindle on the side that acts as the shipping label.
Cheap storage VM.
For a long time at one of the US particle physics accelerators the highest bandwidth connection between the acquisition hardware and the analysis site was a graduate student pedaling a bike with a bunch of tapes in a handlebar basket. Latency was an issue -- especially if riding at night and running into (or being run into by) deer.
I just had Amazon sneakernet some movies to me. Instead of suffer that tedious streaming download I had them put the data on optical disks and mail them to me. When they get here I'll rip them to my hard drive and be all set! That's customer service you just can't get from Hulu. I expect this sort of download to really take off over the next few years.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Just because data have value doesn't mean they're secret. In my work, we deal with many terabytes of imagery data for the surface of the Earth, and sometimes when we need to move a lot of it to another data center, we copy it to hard drives and ship them (and the reverse is also true, that sometimes people ship us hard drives). The data themselves are freely available to the public for download, but it can be easier and faster to ship than to transfer over the net.
Hahahahaha! Apk made you eat your words again Dave420 http://news.slashdot.org/comme...