There’s been some surprise expressed on the interwebs today that Amazon Web Services has begun encouraging customers to use FedEx to ship it large amounts of data and thus “bypass the Internet.” But this is nothing new. Many years ago, storage guru Jim Gray named this technique “Terascale Sneakernet”, reporting a highly respectable transfer rate for a terabyte of data — including the time taken to read and write it at each end — of “seven megabytes per second … UPS takes 24 hours, and 9 hours at each end to do the copy.”
I was reminded of the Jim Gray story last year by the tale of a South African IT company that made headlines when it realized it could send data between its offices faster by attaching a USB stick to a carrier pigeon than over a broadband connection. There’s been a similar horrified reaction to the Amazon news from commentators who feel that the Internet somehow just ought to be faster at transferring data than something as old-fashioned and non-virtual as a national courier network…
[…] Vai daí então montámos a nossa própria SneakerNet: trabalhávamos ambos no LNEC, um dos únicos sítios em Portugal com acesso Internet permanente; duas vezes por dia, ao almoço e depois ao jantar, fazíamos o download das mensagens dos newsgroups mais interessantes ou requisitados; gravávamos em diskettes; e depois íamos ao servidor da Esoterica colocar as mensagens disponiveis localmente. A Amazon ainda não tinha aparecido, mas estávamos muito à frente dela. […]
You have the monopoly on useful informationaren’t monoopleis illegal? 😉