Amazon has developed a service to enable organisations to upload
vast quantities of data into its cloud computing service without
having to rely on an internet connection.
According to the Amazon web services blog, "It would take over
80 days to upload just 1TB of data over a T1 connection."
To overcome this bottleneck, Amazon is providing a
service which allows users to ship disc drives to the company,
where it can be uploaded onto the S3 storage cloud.
Amazon said, "Our new AWS Import/Export service allows you to
ship your data to us. This service is now in a limited beta . We
will take your storage device, load the data into a designated S3
bucket, and send your hardware back to you. The data load takes
place in a secure facility with a high bandwidth, low-latency
connection to Amazon S3. Once the data has been loaded in to S3,
you can process it on EC2, and then store the results anywhere you
would like."
The AWS Import/Export service is aimed at users who have
terabytes and petabytes of data. Amazon has been steadily pushing
its cloud computing infrastructure, to make it cheaper for users to
access.
Last month, it offered low-cost computing for students via the
Amazon cloud.