Google has announced today the launch of Transfer Appliance. It is a new hardware appliance helping corporates to transfer large amounts of data to cloud based data centres. Moreover, the transfer takes place through the third party sender example FedEx.
Google already provided data transfer solutions to corporates. The companies could transfer their data to Google through physical means. Moreover, the form in which data transfers range from storage arrays, tapes, hard disks and USB flash drives. The transfer of data to data centres takes place through the help of third-party partners. However, Transfer Appliance is more complex. Google had to build its own hardware for this technology to succeed. The data in the range of 100TB and 480TB can be sent easily now to the cloud and even more if the data is coherent.
Amazon already has such a service called Snowball. It is similar to what Google is trying to do now. However, Amazon’s version of data transfer is in the range of 50TB to 80TB. If a corporation has more than this, then the Amazon will send a truck to collect the data.
Google concept: They will ship the Transfer Appliance to the corporate centre. The corporate then connects its data rack with the local network; connecting both the data points. Once, it completes the transfer, the appliance is sent back to Google. This is pretty much how the things are going to work.
Google’s group product manager for its cloud products, has said that the corporates were looking for a way to move petabytes of data with ease and speed. Hence, Google saw an opportunity. Therefore they developed Transfer Appliance for big companies to transfer huge amounts of data with flexibility.
The Google’s strategy is to meet their customers wherever they are. To widen the market for Google’s data centre and fight its competitors who are already in the game. Google is finding innovative ways to launch itself ahead.
The base cost to use 100TB of data transfer is $300. Plus shipping charges are extra. For transferring 480TB of data the cost is $1,800 plus an another $900 for the shipping.