I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out.
Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.
3 cents/GB is cheap. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper.
$10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).
If you have moderate volume, you can beat S3 pricing with object solutions like DDN or others. It all depends on your data center capacity and power costs.
If it cost you about $1000 to buy a diskpack (4*6TB drives) you could create backups and send them to at least a half dozen locations for less money than using S3 to store that data.
Yes, S3 is cheap(ish). But given Snowball is a snapshot backup service, it's not comparatively cheaper than it would be to distribute that same data by creating a clone and sending it to a safe place.
That's not really how business IT works (unless you're sending tape off to Iron Mountain, which has its own costs and storage fees).
S3 is the cheapest "real" business storage option besides Backblaze's new storage offering. S3 can't be compared to shipping disks someplace where they sit offline.
Using the calculator for that service, I put in 50TB and 25 hard drives, and the estimated charges came out to $2435.75.
The point where snowball is cheaper is fairly low. 4TB on 2 drives is 194.86. Basically more than 5TB over 2 or more drives and it's cheaper to use snowball. Plus you have to pay to have the drives returned back to you.
"Sneakernet" is an amusing term to me, because prior to the advent of widespread, high-speed Internet access, this was the only way to transfer large amounts of data.
Actually the term was invented long before Internet access was widely available, let alone high speed. It describes transfering data between computers located in the same room (or building) using floppy disks. The alternative was to use some kind of networking, like 10baseT coax ethernet, or one of the many other competing standards, that existed back in the early eighties.
And before the Internet was commonplace, people had to use data lines provisioned by the telephone company to link distant offices, and could also send data that way, as larger companies still do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet