Amazon recently announced an Import/Export service for S3 that lets you ship or have them ship a hard drive loaded with hundreds of gigabytes or more that would normally take days or longer to backup through even the fastest data connection.  In the announcement Amazon states:

Amazon Web Services has announced the limited beta of AWS Import/Export, a new offering that accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity. You can use AWS Import/Export for migrating data into the cloud, sending backups to AWS, and interchanging data with others.

You can learn more information about the service on their import/export information page.  The costs are fairly minimal considering the amount of data handled as it is $80 per device and $2.49 per hour for the labor involved in loading the data, plus the standard charges for storing the data on S3.

This service is still very much in a Beta limited environment, but there is some promise in this.  Let’s be honest if you had a T-1 line (1.5Mb per second) it would take over two months to send 1TB of data to Amazon!  When you are talking about that length of time, all of a sudden a few days using UPS suddenly doesn’t seem all that bad.  It will be interesting to watch as more and more companies move to the cloud, but this definitely looks like an extremely interesting tool to help those companies take that leap of faith to pull the trigger and move fast volumes of data.

Luckily at nuCloud we don’t deal with these vast amounts of data, although if someone was wanting to host GBs worth of streaming video through us we sure would figure out a way to make that happen.

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Award Winners

1. Carnegie-Mellon University
2. Flordia International Unviersity
3. MIT
4. Purdue
5. University of California-Irvine
6. UC-San Diego
7. UC-Santa Barbara
8. University of Maryland
9. University of Massachusetts
10. University of Virginia
11. University of Washington
12. University of Wisconsin
13. University of Utah
14. Yale

Although these universities will run a range of projects what is most interesting is academia’s excitement and embracement of this rapidly developing and exciting technology.

“Academic researchers have expressed a need for access to massively scaled computing infrastructures that allow them to complete projects and research activities that have been difficult or impossible previously due to the amount of data involved” Jeannette Wing, NSF’s assistant director for computer and information science and engineering

These projects demonstrate the computational power and distributed resource capacity that cloud computing can allow, but by no means should this be limited to research projects.  Tapping into this powerful resource from a marketing and distribution channel perspective provides just as much flexibility and accessibility.

The important takeaway is that the embracement of this technology and relationships being built with these leading technology companies, IBM & Google, simply display more reasons to explore more of this technology and the services that it can provide.  Those services could be streaming video, interactive multimedia map elements or any number of other advancements.  The point being academia is ready for these new technologies and finding ways to embrace and utilizing them for the computation power or the cost saving and decreased administrative efforts.

So what do you think?  Are more institutes ready to embrace cloud computing?

More Information

• http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/universities-get-5-million-in-grants-use-ibmgoogle-cloud-016
• http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/100807-google-ibm-parallel-computing.html

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