Amazon's cloud computing business recently unveiled a new initiative to deploy, in essence, the world's largest zip drive.
The Wall Street Journal last week detailed Snowmobile, which was announced by Amazon Web Services at the e-retailer's customer conference in Las Vegas.
The Snowmobile is a 45-foot-long shipping container capable of storing 100 petabytes of data — or 100 million gigabytes — that could be driven from individual companies to Amazon facilities using a semi-truck.
The system, Amazon officials said, would enable the transfer of massive amounts of company data to the Cloud in less than six months' time; a conventional internet connection, they said, would complete that process in 26 years.
"You would not believe, now, how many companies now have exabytes of data that they want to move to the Cloud," said AWS chief Andy Jassy.
Snowmobile would cost about $500,000 per month at full capacity, but that would translate to half a cent per gigabyte, the paper noted. Companies are reportedly already using one of several Snowmobiles owned by Amazon.
The name, meanwhile, is a reference to Snowball, Amazon's suitcase-sized data transfer system introduced last year. The company also announced an upgraded Snowball at the conference, along with a series of new artificial intelligence capabilities.
