Amazon latest innovation is... a truck.
The tech company will haul insane amounts of data in its Amazon Snowmobile, a truck that Amazon Web Services unveiled on Wednesday.
If you saw the Snowmobile on the highway, you'd just think it was a regular old truck. But the Snowmobile is actually a "45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck."
The data transfer service can move 100 petabytes of data, or 1 million gigabytes. Ten Snowmobiles equals one exabyte of data, or 1 billion gigabytes. It takes about 10 days to fill one Snowmobile. Those 10 Snowmobiles could transfer an exabyte in six months — a process that would usually take decades.
SEE ALSO:This trick will get your Amazon Echo and Google Home stuck in a loopThe Snowmobile follows Amazon's Snowball, a handheld box that stores one petabyte of data. Companies use the Snowball to transfer data to Amazon's cloud. Amazon says companies could use the Snowmobile to get rid of their own data centers altogether.
Amazon Web Services staff have to set up a Snowmobile so a company can access it as a network storage target. With the Snowmobile on site, companies transfer their data. Then Amazon drives the truck right back to its own site. The data is stored on Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier, depending which cloud storage service a company selects.
SEE ALSO:The technology that may finally make ‘clean’ cookstoves a realityData transferred via Snowmobile is secured by both encryption keys and old-fashioned security staff, 24/7 video surveillance and even an escort vehicle. The truck is temperature-controlled and water-resistant.
The Snowmobile needs 350 kilowatts to fully run, from either a local power source or an Amazon-provided generator.
Pricing depends on how much data a company transfers in the Snowmobile, but the base price for storage is $0.005 a month per gigabyte — $5,000 for a fully loaded truck. Right now, the Snowmobile is available in most U.S. states, Amazon says.
Look out for Snowmobiles on the highway.
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