In the race to win clients in the highly competitive cloud computing market, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has taken to transporting client data in high-tech tractor trailers.
AWS recently introduced its data-on-wheels platform with the appropriate yuletide moniker of Snowmobile.
ZDNet covered the recent launch of the data truck by AWS CEO Andy Jassy. He hailed the mobile data storage vehicle as an innovation that solves data transport challenges which remains a key obstacle to moving largescale workloads to the cloud.
See also: Amazon unveils Greengrass for IoT developers
Specifically, migrating massive data sets in the petabyte range to the hybrid cloud remains problematic and a huge bandwidth hog.
Enter Snowmobile, a secure tractor trailer that can store up to 100 petabytes (PB) of data at time. Moving information via the truck can allow exabytes of data to migrate to AWS over a few weeks. For those unfamiliar with mind-numbingly large units of data, an exabyte equals one thousand petabytes.
And the company also announced a new storage appliance called Snowball Edge. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan believes this technology will up AWS’ game in the Internet of Things (IoT) space.
“What makes this interesting is that AWS’ Jassy also redefined on-premise infrastructure,” said Dignan. “Forget servers and datacenters. On-prem infrastructure will really be your sensors and things in the field that are connected.”
“Naturally, AWS wants to be in that IoT mix,” he adds.
Amazon also going growing Greengrass
And to further its IoT offering, AWS also released Greengrass, which is a system that relieves remote devices and sensors of computing workloads. This is done by allowing for local messaging, data caching and computation.
The expanded offerings of AWS come as cloud computing and IT infrastructure are proving to be especially potent drivers of IoT revenues. This stems from vendors’ expanded role in helping companies cope with ever increasing rivers of data being pumped out by proliferating IoT devices.
A report from earlier this year shows healthy revenues for 21 benchmarked IoT companies with quarterly revenue growing by almost 15% to levels approaching $7 billion.
