Not without a sense of naming humor Amazon.com, Inc. has introduced something completely unexpected: a physical data transfer service.

Called Snowball (as in a snowball’s chance in hell), the new service facilitates the transfer of data to the cloud through an appliance that can hold up to 50 terabytes of data with secure, end-to-end encrypted storage in a tamper-proof enclosure.

Amazon is pitching the service at companies that need to transfer massive amounts of data to the cloud but struggle to do so over the internet, still a reality in 2015 despite high speed Internet connections of T3 and above.

“Many of our customers find that the data migration aspect of an all-in move to the cloud presents some surprising issues,” AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said on the AWS Official Blog. “In many cases, these customers are planning to decommission their existing data centers after they move their apps and their data; in such a situation, upgrading their last-generation networking gear and boosting connection speeds makes little or no sense.”

How it works

A Snowball device is ordered through the AWS Management Console and is delivered to site within a few days; customers can order multiple devices and devices can be run in parallel.

Described as coming in its “own shipping container” (it doesn’t require packing or unpacking) the Snowball is entirely self-contained, complete with 110 Volt power, a 10 GB network connection on the back and an E Ink display/control panel on the front.

Once received it’s simply a matter of plugging the device in, connecting it to a network, configuring the IP address, and installing the AWS Snowball client; a job manifest and 25 character unlock code complete the task.

When the transfer of data is complete the device is disconnected and a shipping label will automatically appear on the E Ink display; once shipped back to Amazon (currently only the Oregon data center is supporting the service, with others to follow) the data will be decrypted and copied to S3 bucket(s) as specified by the customer.

Cost wise Amazon Import/Export Snowball (the full name) is surprisingly affordable: each import/export job is charged $200, with the first 10 days of onsite usage free then extra usage being charged at $15 a day.

Amazon is not charging a cent for importing the data from Snowball into S3, but it will charge $0.03 per GB for export.

The service is available now with further details available from the AWS Import/Export site here.

Image credit: zokuga/Flickr/CC by 2.0