In September 2009, Durban company Unlimited IT reportedly pitted a messenger pigeon against South African ISP Telkom to transfer 4 GB of data 60 miles (97 km) from Howick to Durban. The pigeon, carrying the data on a memory stick, arrived in one hour eight minutes, with the data taking another hour to read from the memory stick. During the same two-hour period, only about 4.2% of the data had been transferred over the ADSL link.
I first thought that this was a joke, but why not?
In the end 100PB would take +2months with a 100Gbps fiber link, that’s pretty huge, and the traffic would cost a lot with network operators…
Many people in HPC and backup services have mailed each other HD’s or storage computers for some time. Especially easy if it’s a once a month thing with hundreds of GBs or a TB.
Source: Andy Tannenbaum.
Source: Sneakernet
I first thought that this was a joke, but why not? In the end 100PB would take +2months with a 100Gbps fiber link, that’s pretty huge, and the traffic would cost a lot with network operators…
Many people in HPC and backup services have mailed each other HD’s or storage computers for some time. Especially easy if it’s a once a month thing with hundreds of GBs or a TB.
AWS supports that use case for ages, called Snowball (which is why the Snowmobile is called like that, it carries 1250 Snowballs).
https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/
A clear sign that our demand for (electromagnetic) infrastructure support has exceeded our current actual technical capacity.
I wonder what’s inside – is it spinning rust hard drives or is it flash?