Amazon cloud gets mega storage escape hatch In theory, you can upload an infinite amount of data to Amazon's cloud. But squeezing infinite amounts of data through today's internet pipes is another matter. This spring, in an effort to accommodate those looking to sit epic amounts of data on its S3 storage cloud, Amazon introduced a new service that lets you import and …
"But squeezing infinite amounts of data through today's internet pipes is another matter".
You're abusing the word "infinite". Of course, squeezing infinite amounts of data through any physical channel would take infinite time. The characteristics of today's internet pipes is irrelevant.
I think we've found out why the cloud isn't the future as this kind of seems pretty pointless unless what they are actually sending is program code to be instaslled in the cloud as using it for data storage obviously isn't practical unless database and the programs that query it are both in the same cloud and the operation doesn't require the transfer of massive amounts of data otherwise Amazon's internal bandwidth will be quickly clogged up.
All this cloud stuff sounds impressive but it still comes down to individual storage, servers and networking appliances so its just shifting the management headache.
... the more they stay the same.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth capability of a station wagon full of mag tape." (Often attributed to Tanenbaum in 1996, but it was a common expression when I was at DEC long before that ... and I remember a similar comment from a student at Stanford in the early '80s when a professor expressed surprise at one of the vaxen already running the latest BSD build, released just a few hours before. Conversation went "How on earth did you get that code across the network that fast?" answer was "My motorcycle's latency might be sub-par, but it still has a much higher bandwidth capability than your network!".)
So let me get this right,
Instead of having your data on a decent speed SATA Interface and accessing it for almost free, you can send it and pay to have it copied, and then pay some more to access it more slowly, as well as relying on amazon and your internet provider to not be slow or down and UPS not to play footie with your hard drive. sounds like a great deal.
I'm really surprised about the comments here. Amazon S3 is pretty dam cool infrastructure, nobody came even close to this model. Of course it is not the answer for every data storage task, but it is great for everybody who needs to quickly increase/decrease storage as well as everybody who does not want to spend big bucks for NAS/network. There are tons of companies utilizing S3 and import/export just another feature they added.
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