ThinkVirt

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Import/Export is a feature few people know about that can quickly expedite moving your data into the cloud.

Some of you may already be familiar with the strategic and financial advantages from leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as your storage platform. However, there are a few different solutions to actually migrate your data to S3.

HTTP/FTP is one method, but costs are incurred for the traffic headed into S3.

$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150TB

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

Hypothetical
Transfer over HTTP/FTP to S3
CustomerA has 750GB of data to move into S3. It will involve 4,000 requests.

750GB * $0.170/GB = $127.50
4,000 requests * $0.01/request = $40.00
TOTAL = $167.50

AWS Import/Export Service
AWS Import/Export is not free, but the costs incurred can be significantly cheaper.

Device Handling
$80.00 per storage device handled.
Data Loading Time
$2.49 per data-loading-hour. Partial data-loading-hours are billed as full hours.

Let's say I ship AWS a 1TB drive with my 750GB of data.

1 device * $80.00/device = $80.00.

Now I will be very conservative and say that the device gets 10MB/sec WRITE when plugged into AWS' infrastructure.

750GB * 1024MB/GB = 768,000MB
768,000 MB / 10MB/sec = 76,800 seconds
76,800 seconds / 3600 seconds/hour = 21.33-->22 hours

22 hours $2.49 = $54.78.

TOTAL = $134.78

That would yield $34.72 in savings.

Now as the data set grows, so do the savings.

Using the same logic as illustrated above and taking requests completely out of the picture, 3TB would cost $522.24 to transfer via HTTP/FTP.

If you had that data set on three 1TB drives, that would take 88 hours. Let's round up to 90 for drive swap time. That's $240 for the drives and $224.10 for transfer time. That's $464.10 or roughly 11% cheaper.

There are more advantages than just cost, such as the conduit of transfer, reliability of the transfer protocol, et cetera. For organizations with scores of TBs, the AWS Import service makes a world of sense.