Amazon Web Services has released a rented device that physically migrates data from on-premises hardware to its public cloud. Amazon senior vice president of web services Andy Jassy launched the new Snowball service in front of 19,000 attendees at the vendor’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. “Even for companies that have pretty good connections, it’s very unlikely you want to saturate the network with moving data to AWS,” Jassy said, adding that it would take 100 days to move 100TB of data to the cloud even if 10 percent of bandwidth was dedicated from a 100Mbps corporate network. “That’s why people say: never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx truck.” AWS vice president of engineering Bill Vass then showed the crowd a tamper-proof, shock-proof device that looks like a large briefcase. The 50TB storage device, lent out by AWS, is delivered to the customer’s premises for ten days to copy the data on. The Snowball is “rugged enough to withstand a 6G jolt” and weighs 23kg. The device has an external electronic ink display panel, which Jassy described as “a Kindle”, that dynamically changes the delivery address for the courier. The self-contained units have a 10GB network connection for fast data transfer, and the data is encrypted as it is copied onto the device. The Snowball units are then sent back by the customer for AWS staff to decrypt the data and “copy it to the S3 bucket(s) that you specified when you made your request”, according to an AWS blog post.