Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be! Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades. On the business side, adding new networking or better connectivity to data centers that are scheduled to be decommissioned after a migration is expensive and hard to justify.
Last year we announced the AWS Snowball (see AWS Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances for more information) as a step toward addressing large-scale data migrations. With 80 TB of storage, these appliances address the needs of many of our customers, and are in widespread use today.
However, customers with exabyte-scale on-premises storage look at the 80 TB, do the math, and realize that an all-out data migration would still require lots of devices and some headache-inducing logistics.