If you were wondering how the cloud was going to magically handle all your high-res media, today has brought an answer.  Amazon introduced its latest cloud gateway, called ‘Snowmobile’ – and no, it’s not April 1st nor am I making any of this up.  It’s a semi truck housing 100 petabytes of data storage, and it pulls up to your front door, hooks up (presumably via 10 Gigabit Ethernet) and copies all your stuff from your server, before driving off to Amazon’s nearest datacenter.  They developed this because, understandably, people were disappointed at the upload times for massive amounts of media and other big data; last-mile bandwidth is still often much more limited than we’d like.  This isn’t an argument against the viability and obvious robust health of the cloud IT model, just a reality check that some things, like big collections of media files, still live on and are best managed on actual drive-based storage.  Of course, at axle all our products are built on that principle, so we’re delighted to see Amazon, uh, driving our way.