If you are looking for an alternative to mail your hard drive to Amazon, as we wrote about earlier this summer, then you might want to consider Aspera’s On-Demand for AWS, which was announced earlier this month. The software speeds up transfer of really large data sets (say more than 50 GB) into Amazon’s cloud services.
Pricing is a bit complex. There are two components: a data transfer charge of 15 cents per GB and a $25 daily charge. Then there are AWS charges for how you store and access this data once it gets there, of course. All the billing is done through your Amazon account. You need to use the Aspera Connect browser plug-in to enable the transfer, and also set up your subscription and start an EC2 instance using the Aspera On-Demand Amazon machine instance ID. Given these factors, it might be cheaper and less hassle to directly send your drive to Amazon via the postal method.
Aspera makes other tools to enable higher performance data transfer operations, including Faspex v2.5, its person-to-person file delivery software; Sync, for scalable, multidirectional synchronization of large file stores; and Orchestrator, its Web-based framework for creating and managing automated file processing pipelines.
