SoylentNews

martyb writes:

There is a story at ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Queue concerning what is the best practice on getting data from here to there: Should You Upload or Ship Big Data to the Cloud? -- The accepted wisdom does not always hold true.

There is an old adage to never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes going down the highway. The challenge is knowing when it is better (cheaper/faster) to ship it vs send it. This analysis will help you to decide.

This article investigates the tradeoffs between speed of communications between your systems and the cloud provider, how fast you can store your data to removable media/drives, and shipping delays so as to help you decide the fastest way to get your data from your systems to a cloud storage provider.

I found the article to be generally in-depth and well done but I do have a couple of caveats.

First, I saw no analysis of the impact on having faster shipping/turnaround on the tradeoffs. The assumption is that it would take 48 hours for shipping and handling for physical media. I would have liked to see what impact it would have on the analysis if that were, say, 24 hours instead.

Also, an assumption is made that the cloud provider would need to copy from your media to put it on their systems. A variation I did not see explored was to have media that could be directly mounted at the cloud provider — whether the media was supplied in advance by the provider or met certain provider-required specs. In either case, that would avoid the need for another copying pass of the data. That, in turn might greatly change the analysis of whether it would be faster to ship media or just upload it over the internet.

Those quibbles aside, it is one of they better articles I've seen that investigates that actual tradeoffs.

Ed Note: Obligatory xkcd and another

Original Submission