The biggest irony of storing loads of data in the cloud is that it has to get there first. For some companies, that means their data takes a cross country road trip.

Today’s destination? Mountain View California.

Google has stepped up its cloud migration game, recently introducing the Google Transfer Appliance (GTA), which is essentially a shippable network connected hard drive capable of storing 100 TB or 480 TB of raw data before it’s uploaded to Google’s Cloud Servers. Essentially, GTA is Google’s answer to Amazon Web Service’s Snowmobile, minus the truck.

How Does the Transfer Appliance Work?

Google ships users the Transfer Appliance, and after that, they will have 10 days to fill the smaller appliance or 25 days to fill the larger one before sending it back to Google where it can be uploaded to their Cloud service. It’s a rental product, and incurs late fees for durations longer than 10 or 25 days.

Upon receiving the Transfer Appliance, users install it into standard 18-inch data center racks, connect it to their local network and wait for it to fill up before sending it back to Google. 

What Does the Transfer Appliance Cost?

The smaller 100 TB Transfer Appliance costs $300 plus estimated shipping charges of about $500 while the 489 TB model costs $1,800 to rent and around $900 to ship back.

What’s Great About the Transfer Appliance?

The biggest benefit of Google’s Transfer Appliance is the speed at which it can back up data compared to doing so over a standard network connection. Max capacity for the larger Transfer Appliance is close to 1 petabyte, which can take about 3 years to upload to the cloud on a 10 Gbps connection. Google states that the Transfer Appliance can back up this amount of data in less than 25 days, with that data accessible in Google Cloud Storage within another 25 days.

Who Does the Transfer Appliance Benefit?

Petabyte-sized data centers are usually reserved for enterprise sized companies, with half a terabyte usually being more than enough to suit most small businesses.
To put it in perspective, Wal Mart has roughly 40 Petabytes in its data cloud.

Working on a Smaller Scale? Give ThrottleNet a Try for Your Cloud Migration

 If the Google Transfer Appliance provides too much horsepower for your business, but you want to make the switch to the cloud as seamless as possible, contact us today. We have solutions for desktop virtualization in the cloud, cloud email, cloud storage and cloud voice with unmatched reliability, and have been trusted in the St. Louis area for over 17 years.