Sachin Date describes a problem that persists for many people who have limited access to a high-speed Internet connection.
The choices are to either transfer the data over the Internet or ship the data using an overnight or second-day shipping service. These choices are summarized as “send it or ship it.”
“Send it” requires using a transfer program. The disadvantage here is the speed. Residential Internet service provider (ISP) services may provide a maximum speed of 100 megabits/second. This speed is slow if you are transferring one terabyte of data.
“Ship it” physically transfers the data on an external hard drive or tape cartridge to a desired location where a cloud storage provider has established a system for receiving and moving data into a cloud storage environment. Once the data arrives at the remote location, it can be transferred fairly quickly.
Date focuses on transfer methods associated with the large cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. These providers have the ability to receive data over the Internet or receive the data if it is shipped via an overnight or second-day service.
Date ignores the environment associated with organizations that do not use the major cloud data storage services.
Research organizations such as universities and national laboratories may have access to the Internet with high-speed data connections (that is, 1 Gbps or faster). For example, globus.org provides a software-as-a-service model for transferring data at speeds up to one TB/hour. This software is a front end to the gridFTP routines that are part of the globus toolkit. Organizations with high-speed Internet connections can also download the globus toolkit and use the gridFTP software to establish a high-speed point-to-point transfer service.
I recommend this article because Date gives a good introduction to the problems associated with transferring large amounts of data from one location to another. The article is only 21 pages long and is limited in what it can cover in this amount of space.
