Amazon recently announced their new AWS Import/Export service which allows customers to ship data on one or more portable storage devices to be loaded into Amazon S3. Amazon recommends that customers needing to upload large data sets should use the AWS Import/Export service, as it can take days or weeks to move large data volumes to the S3 cloud over the internet. Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, explains the rational and drivers for this new service in his latest blog post.
In the world of structured data, we think RainStor already addresses the problem of shipping massive data sets to the cloud. Although we’re an Amazon partner, we’ve taken a different approach to moving large volumes of “structured” data (e.g. data from databases, logs files etc.) to S3. RainStor provides a client-side VM with the service (RSLoader) that automatically compresses and encrypts data prior to uploading to S3. With compression rates typically 40:1, this dramatically reduces the upload times. As clients own the encryption keys, the data is always secure and never vulnerable during transfer or when the data is at rest in S3.