By Jay Greene By Laura Stevens
LAS VEGAS -- In Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com Inc. has built
one of the most powerful computing networks in the world, on pace
to post more than $12 billion in revenue this year.
But the retail giant on Wednesday proposed a surprising way to
move data from large corporate customers' data centers to its
public cloud-computing operation: by truck.
Networks can move massive amounts data only so fast. Trucks, it
turns out, can move it faster.
To the sound of throbbing heavy-metal music and flashes of
strobe lights, Amazon drove a big rig onto the floor of the Sands
Expo & Convention Center during the company's annual customer
conference.
The tractor-trailer hauls a massive storage device, dubbed
Snowmobile, in the form of a 45-foot shipping container that holds
100 petabytes of data. A petabyte is about 1 million gigabytes.
Transporting data from companies to cloud providers has become
immensely time-consuming as corporate data storage has ballooned
from terabytes to petabytes to exabytes, each step a factor of
roughly 1,000 larger than the last.
"When we started AWS [in 2006], the notion of an exabyte of data
just seemed completely out there," AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy
said. "Today, an exabyte of data is much more common." That is
equivalent to about 250 million DVDs or one trillion books of 400
pages each.
Amazon plans to drive Snowmobiles to its customers' offices,
extract their data, then cruise to an Amazon facility where the
information can be transferred to the cloud-computing network in
far less time than it would for so much data to travel over the
web.
The company, however, isn't promising lightning speed. Ten
Snowmobiles would reduce the time it takes to move an exabyte from
on-premises storage to Amazon's cloud to a little less than six
months, from about 26 years using a high-speed internet connection,
by the company's calculations.
During a press conference, Mr. Jassy declined to disclose the
cost of each Snowmobile unit but noted that the company has
"several" of them. The trucks are currently available and customers
are using them, he said. Snowmobile will cost half a cent per
gigabyte per month of use, or about $500,000 a month to use its
full capacity.
This isn't the first time Amazon has circumvented the web to
move data faster. Last year it introduced a suitcase-sized
data-transfer service appliance known as Snowball. Amazon on
Wednesday upgraded that gadget, doubling its capacity to 100
terabytes.
But for customers who sought to move petabytes or even exabytes
of data, the larger Snowball wouldn't be enough.
"The first thing we thought was, 'We're going to need a bigger
box,' " Mr. Jassy said.
The truck and the suitcase-sized device are part of the retail
giant's bid to woo large corporate customers, who have invested
heavily in their own data centers, to move to Amazon's cloud. Many
have shifted key computing operations to cloud providers, but a
significant number continue to run some jobs in their own
facilities, even as they take advantage of public cloud providers,
an arrangement known as hybrid cloud.
Relatively rapid data-transfer methods such as Snowmobile and
Snowball may spur them to move faster to use Amazon's services.
Nonetheless, Mr. Jassy acknowledged that the majority of
companies likely would keep some computing operations in-house.
"Most enterprises are going to operate in hybrid mode for many
years to come," he said.
That is one reason why Amazon announced a partnership last month
with VMware Inc. to allow VMware customers to take advantage of AWS
services without abandoning their data centers.
VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger joined Mr. Jassy on stage
Wednesday and called the response to the joint offering
"overwhelming."
At the conference, Amazon also debuted new services intended to
help coders build web-based applications that tap into the retail
giant's artificial-intelligence capabilities.
Amazon Rekognition will let software developers write programs
that detect the number of people in a photo, spot their gender and
identify objects. It also can match faces, which could be useful in
comparing two images to confirm, for example, a person's
identity.
The company also launched Amazon Polly, which converts text to
speech. It lets programmers transform text input, such as "The temp
in WA is 75 degrees F," into spoken output that says, "The
temperature in Washington is 75 degrees Fahrenheit." This feature,
available in 27 languages, could be used to build conversational
applications.
Another new offering, Amazon Lex, affords access to the Alexa
artificial-intelligence service that runs on the company's Echo
device. LEX understands spoken input, enabling developers to build
software that answers questions.
A pizza company, for example, could build a web-based program
that asks users what toppings they want when they order a pie. Such
an application could keep track of previous orders so the system
could ask customers if they wanted the same toppings again, Mr.
Jassy explained.
"A lot of companies don't realize the heritage that Amazon has
in the machine-learning space," Mr. Jassy said, referring to the
area of artificial intelligence that makes such services
practical.
The online retailer has thousands of employees focused on
artificial intelligence, he noted. This could be used for services
that show customers who bought a particular item; what other items
they might like purchase or Echo's Alexa AI assistant.
"We do a lot of AI at the company," and Amazon Web Services
customers wanted access to that, Mr. Jassy said.
Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com and Laura Stevens at
laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 30, 2016 19:34 ET (00:34 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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