Amazon has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to "accelerate moving large amounts of data" to and from Amazon's S3 cloud-based storage solution. Only it doesn't rely on improved network infrastructure—instead, it relies on the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

Now, the mail isn't exactly known for operating at Internet speeds. But the problem that arises in transmitting large amounts of data—even as networks become increasingly fast—is that our collective ability to gather data is outpacing the ability to send and receive it over a wire.

"No matter how much we have improved our network throughput in the past 10 years, our datasets have grown faster, and this is likely to be a pattern that will only accelerate in the coming years," according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. "While the network may improve another order of magnitude in throughput, it is certain that datasets will grow two or more orders of magnitude in the same period of time," he wrote in his blog last week.

So instead of spending days, weeks, or even months trying to funnel a huge dataset through what might be relatively limited bandwidth, the AWS Import/Export service will allow you to dump your data to an external eSATA or USB 2.0 hard drive and ship it to Amazon for upload to the cloud. Obviously, if you need to get a huge dataset out of the cloud, the process works in reverse—Amazon will dump your data to a drive and ship it back to you.

Amazon says that any dataset that would take a week or more to transmit over the network should definitely be considered for AWS Import/Export. The company even provides a helpful table showing the theoretical transfer times for 1TB of data, which gives users a guide of how large a dataset would have to be before shipping it through the mail makes sense.

Available Internet Connection Theoretical Min. Number of Days to Transfer 1TB at 80% Network Utilization When to Consider AWS Import/Export? T1 (1.544Mbps) 82 days 100GB or more 10Mbps 13 days 600GB or more T3 (44.736Mbps) 3 days 2TB or more 100Mbps 1 to 2 days 5TB or more 1000Mbps Less than 1 day 60TB or more

Unless you are a large company or university with dedicated high-bandwidth access that can be completely tuned over to data transfer, though, sending a hard drive in the mail makes a lot of sense. At 10Mbps, for instance, it would take 13 days of sustained, maximum bandwidth to move 1TB of data. Many smaller businesses don't have that kind of bandwidth to tie up for such a long period. And if they are on some kind of metered plan, moving that much data would be cost prohibitive.

Despite promises of terabit ethernet and fiber-to-the-premises, we know that even large theoretical bandwidth claims are rarely realized. Even today, we are just reaching the capacity to make the promise of a basic consumer service like Netflix a reality—for the first 11 years, Netflix relied on the postal service to transmit up to 9GB of data to its users for under a dollar. Amazon's AWS Import/Export service provides a reasonablly fast and cost-effective means of transferring ever-expanding collections of data—even if it relies on moving that data via truck, plane, or foot instead of over our near-ubiquitous network connections.

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