| Amazon Goes Postal Because Broadband is Too Slow |
| Thursday, 28 May 2009 03:27 |
 AT&T shouldn't be slower than the Post Office at moving data. My $99 new Seagate terabyte drive would take six months to back up over an ordinary DSL or cable modem uplink. Literally. With Jennie's video work, we'll fill it in months. Werner Vogels' customers at Amazon S3 often move large data files, which would take weeks even at 10 megabits.
Vogels' Solution: the Post Office and Federal Express. Amazon S3 with AWS Import/Export is the fancy name for long distance sneakernet. Werner blogs “no ecommerce site can function anymore without mining massive amounts of data to optimize recommendations to their customers. Also in the systems management domain, data sets are growing faster and faster, consequently backup and disaster recovery has to deal with increasingly large sets.” Speed thrills. “The Third Internet is fast enough to watch.” Thanks to Stacey at GigaOm for the headline. The Seagate Barracuda ST31000528AS OEM is $99 at Newegg including U.S. shipping. It's the size of my hand and is one of the quietest drives I've ever owned. A terabyte is enough room for about 200,000 books, more than most college libraries. Imagine 10,000 volumes of medicine and biology reaching clinics around the world via newsgroups. Or math, chemistry, physics or engineering nearly as comprehensive. Welcome fo the 21st Century. |