"One Snowmobile can transport up to one hundred petabytes of data in a single trip, the equivalent of using about 1,250 AWS Snowball devices." -- https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
You'd have to find a thousand 1GBe ports in your data center (unless Amazon would ship an expensive switch along with Snowballs) -- that's about two server cages' (10 racks x42U) worth. You will have to find a lot of power -- while Snowmobile can bring a generator.
I doubt there will be a lot of demand for Snowmobiles, though.
If you don't have the ports for Snowballs, you won't have them for Snowmobiles. And instead of copying 1 week, shipping, copying another week back, you can have the first data over after 1 day. This can be crucial to already integrate data before everything's there.
I understand the size of a Snowmobile, but if you don't somehow utilize it exactly 100%, I don't think building your own solution is cheaper than renting logistics as a service from others. Basically AWS in the logistics world.
The advantage with Snowmobile is you only need a dozen or so ports, not hundreds.
Also - think about the person having to do this - If I had to move 100 petabytes of data to AWS - I really don't want to be messing around with hundreds of appliances, tracking them, figuring what we uploaded onto what devices, figuring out how to fragment the data to properly fit on all the devices, etc....
I'm not sure that's true -- thinking about our own (small) datacenter, we can find 10 10 gig ports much easier than we could scrounge up 100 1 gbit ports that are in the right place on the network to do a big data transfer like this (i.e. we're not going to open cabinets to plug snowballs into 10 different top of rack switches). Sure we could buy more switches to fan out our spare 10gig ports into 1gig ports, but why bother when AWS has them built-in to the truck?
It seems that any datacenter that's big enough to have a PB of data is going to be able to find 25 40 GBit ports easier than 1000 1Gbit ports.
Even if you only utilize 25% of the Snowmobile, that's 250 individual Snowballs you don't have to handle.
(just bounced this off of one of our network engineers -- if we did have to handle 100 snowballs, we would buy switches, set them up in the big conference room next to the datacenter and run the 10 gig fiber drops over to that conference room where the snowballs would be. He said we're probably looking at $30K in hardware costs to set it up, so the Snowmobile might be cheaper even for 100 snowballs worth of data)
You'd have to find a thousand 1GBe ports in your data center (unless Amazon would ship an expensive switch along with Snowballs) -- that's about two server cages' (10 racks x42U) worth. You will have to find a lot of power -- while Snowmobile can bring a generator.
I doubt there will be a lot of demand for Snowmobiles, though.