When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight — and it weighs in at a honking 120 terabytes — even your fattest pipe to the Internet is going to be too skinny for the job.
Web monitoring company Pingdom reiterates the point in a blog post entitled “FedEx still faster than the Internet.”
Imagine a company with two offices in different cities, perhaps even in different countries. Each office has a 100 megabit internet connection. If the company needs to send a large amount of data from one office to the other, theoretically a 100 megabit connection can muster about 45 gigabyte in one hour if there are no bottlenecks on the way. This ends up being just over one terabyte of data in 24 hours. In other words, for anything larger than one terabyte, it would be faster for this company to just send the data on disks for overnight delivery.
For a real-life example, there is Google’s desire to assist in the transfer 120 terabytes of data from the Hubble telescope. Wired has that story.
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