CASE 121 · BUOY · 2022
A petabyte of imagery, moved without paying for egress at internet speeds.
A geospatial archive had 4.8 petabytes of historical imagery in on-premise tape storage that the regulator wanted off-site by year-end. Over their existing 10Gbps internet link, the transfer would have taken 41 months. We used AWS Snowmobile (the literal truck-with-a-shipping-container) and finished in eleven weeks.
Geospatial archive
COST
2022
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
DATA MOVED
4.8 PB
TIMELINE
11w
INTERNET LINK SAVED
BUSINESS-AS-USUAL
STORAGE COST POST-MIGRATION
−72%
HOW IT WENT
The internet-link math was the giveaway: at the available 10Gbps peak, the transfer would have taken 41 months — longer than the regulatory deadline by an order of magnitude. The cost of upgrading the link would have funded a small fleet of Snowballs anyway.
AWS Snowmobile turned out to be the right size. It arrived on-site in week three, the data centre team loaded it over fortnight (parallel write streams from the tape libraries), and it was on the road to the AWS region by week seven. S3 ingest completed in week ten.
Eleven weeks from kickoff to last object verified in S3 Glacier Deep Archive. The internet link stayed available for normal business throughout. Storage cost on the AWS side came in 72% cheaper than the on-premise tape contract had been costing. Snowmobile is no longer offered as a managed service; the architecture survives as a fleet of Snowballs for any future job at that scale.
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