Google Now Has Its Own AWS Snowball Like Solution

A solution very much like AWS Snowball, that allows organizations to easily get their data into the cloud using the same ingenious method that Amazon Web Services pioneered.

AWS offers a ruggedized storage appliance that the cloud giant sends to company premises so that they can load it up full of data — up to a wholesome 80 TB of capacity. Once loaded, the Snowball rolls back to the Amazon Web Services location where its contents are uploaded directly to the cloud.

Without the costs and latency involved.

Google has now decided that its customers also need the same solution, at least when it comes to uploads to the cloud.

And it has revealed a similar solution nestled into 19 inch racks, which can send either 100 TB or 480 TB of data, or double if you compress data. As with AWS Snowball, Google lets organizations keep the boxes on-premises for a limited time, and then send them back to have their contents uploaded.

These large capacities put them well ahead of the 50 TB and 80 TB that Amazon Web Services offers, but well behind the 100 PB Snowmobile truck.

That’s petabytes, with a capital P.

Additionally, this Google solution is still in beta right now, while Snowballs are already a live option for no less than 11 AWS regions, plus its government cloud.

But at the very least, Google is now able to match the cloud leader in offering a service that AWS has made a name for itself. A hint of the changing cloud landscape, and just how competitive the space is becoming with each passing month.