Re:IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
by jandrese on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @10:08AM
(#14910660)
In total bandwidth the truck is still likely to win, but it won't be a 75x advantage. Closer to 3-4x.
Also note that the Snowball/Snowmobile fit into the first use case. They are loaded up then just plugged in on arrival, and even then the total number of enterprises that have used the services is not very large. The multi-day latency on the first packet means you need to be transferring enough data that it would take more than those few days to transfer on a STM-4 or similar. It works out to a tremendous amount of data.
Of course if you are an arctic researcher who has collected hundreds of petabytes of sensor measurements and only have a satellite backhaul, then this makes tons of sense. But for anybody with a solid backbone connection the calculus is much less favorable.
Also note that the Snowball/Snowmobile fit into the first use case. They are loaded up then just plugged in on arrival, and even then the total number of enterprises that have used the services is not very large. The multi-day latency on the first packet means you need to be transferring enough data that it would take more than those few days to transfer on a STM-4 or similar. It works out to a tremendous amount of data.
Of course if you are an arctic researcher who has collected hundreds of petabytes of sensor measurements and only have a satellite backhaul, then this makes tons of sense. But for anybody with a solid backbone connection the calculus is much less favorable.