SoftLayer Adds Mail-In Data Transfer Service

On-demand data center services provider SoftLayer Technologies has announced a new service that enables customers to transfer large amounts of data using a USB-compatible device such as a USB hard drive, CD, or DVD.

According to SoftLayer’s Monday announcement, Data Transfer is ideal for customers who want to transfer large amounts of data very efficiently, or for those who have data that they prefer to not transmit over the network. This service is also available to all SoftLayer customers at no additional charge, and SoftLayer will provide free return shipping on all equipment received.

To use the service, SoftLayer customers fill out a request form via the SoftLayer Customer Portal and then send their USB device or optical disk to the SoftLayer data center of their choice. At the data center, the device or disk will be physically connected into a custom, dedicated Media Data Transfer Service server, which customers can then connect the device or disk as an iSCSI target to a server or computing instance in their network, and remotely control their own data transfer.

SoftLayer hardware solutions manager Brad Lewis notes that this approach can be eliminate downtime. “[Customers] can move the volume between the computing units in their environment without the downtime that would come from physically moving the device or disk from server to server,” he said in a statement.

SoftLayer chief technology officer Nathan Day said this can be used for a variety of solutions. “Besides providing data transfer that doesn’t eat up bandwidth, it provides a great option and increased flexibility for practical applications, like disaster recovery and offsite backup,” Day stated.

While reliance on physically shipping data may seem like a step backwards, it is, in fact, becoming an important option because, even with shipping time factored in, it is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than a connectivity upgrade for transferring large data sets.

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out ofAWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet.

As a sign of how useful this transfer option is, cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com), for instance, offer its “AWSImport/Export” service, which lets customers importing and export data into and out of Amazon S3 buckets using external media. Unlike SoftLayer, however, Amazon charges $80.00 per storage device for handled, as well as $2.49 per data-loading-hour.