
Introducing Transfer Appliance: Sneakernet for the cloud era - nealmueller
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/07/introducing-Transfer-Appliance-Sneakernet-for-the-cloud-era.html
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bpicolo
To be fair, AWS launched a much, much larger analogue to AWS Snowball.
[https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/)

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Jyaif
"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.

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losteric
I assume these services were originally created to meet government contracting
requirements (transporting highly classified information).

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compuguy
That would require a whole other set of security requirements than this has.

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jrowley
This a bit tangental but I like the graphs/visualizations they used in this
ad. Easy to read and interrupt

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boulos
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...](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SnFabcStXhM/WW4SEhj6adI/AAAAAAAAEIE/wd6Yqlbt9FELUxsvTc2F92GZDZq2I-_6QCLcBGAs/s1600/transfer-
appliance-2.png)

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vgt
To add to Boulos point - Google Cloud has the "Cloud Transfer Service" [0]
that's hugely popular. It's easy to get connectivity to Google's vast network
of POPS and this service helps take advantage of that connectivity. Also S3.

(work at G but not in any of these areas)

[https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/](https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/)

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tpetry
The ability to export data from GCP to maybe your own datacenter is really
missing.

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nealmueller
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.

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gist
Same issue.

Another idea would be for GCP to handle export to a physical device and that
device would be shipped to a known location (to both GCP and the client) and
accessible by either but offline and cold stored. And similar to how paper
records are stored you could put in a request to access the records and
thereby verify their existence (which you can't do with cloud data other than
the copy that you are able to access).

Fwiw, Iron Mountain lost about 60 physical records file boxes that we had ..

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twakefield
"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?

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btian
GCP has proprietary machine learning accelerator hardware that you can't buy.

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binaryblitz
$300 for a 100TB rackable drive? Can I just keep it instead?

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trevyn
$30 per day after 10 day grace period: [https://cloud.google.com/data-
transfer/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/data-transfer/pricing)

It would be funnier if you could keep it indefinitely, but reads were
$0.12/GB. ;)

I wonder if that's a viable business model...

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shiftpgdn
Nimble offers great local storage on a pay per month per use model. I'm sure
HP is working hard to ruin this.

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wtvanhest
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?

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theDoug
I've happily used Arq
([https://www.arqbackup.com/](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)

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grogenaut
it's multi cloud so I think you're safe from showing a bias.

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peterjlee
So a Hooli Box?

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compuguy
Hooli Box compresses _and_ stores data. This is just used to transfer data to
GCP.

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brianwawok
This compresses.

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milesward
1 petabyte compressed! Woot!

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CaliforniaKarl
Awwwww, it's too bad this can't be used to get stuff directly into Drive.

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nealmueller
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.

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Poiesis
Anyone know what's inside the box?

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westernmostcoy
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.

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sctb
Yes, thank you. We've updated the title from “Google launches a larger
analogue to AWS Snowball”.

