Airlifting harddisks from London - Frankfurt - PA-34 ?
 

Hello

I have a little problem, as need to shift a few hard disks, only weighing perhaps 20 kilos total, as fast as possible from a data center in east - central London to downtown Frankfurt.

Transferring electronically is too slow due to the amount of data.

I've ruled out scheduled flights, including freight ones, as can't obey check-in times, or time limits on handing-in the items.

Was thinking if anyone knew of smaller no-hassle airports at both places, where any formalities can be expedited.

Was likewise thinking of whether something like a PA-34 might be suitable for this, should be able to cover the distance in less than 2hrs.

Good ideas and pointers to who might be able to do this more than welcome !

Thanks
G

Hi DeltaHotel, thanks for replying.

We regrettably don't have time for a "scheduled" (overnight / next morning) kind of operation.

What I'm after is ideally placing the goods into the baggage compartment while the engines are being started, and the the reverse at the destination, hence speculating in smaller airports and aircraft.

Any decent charter broker should be able to get you a small jet on an AOC to do this (do make sure it's got an AOC). If you really want speed then outbound from London City is super easy (though city reduces the choice of operators slightly). I have no connection with them but vaguely know some good people at Centreline or Xclusive jet but as I say any broker should be able to sort this.

At a guess under £10K from London City to Frankfurt, in a Citation, flight time; about an hour and a bit.

For sure worth asking real carriers - if you wave the kind of money you are talking about at them they may be able to help.

You need to consider the acceptable delivery failure rate, I doubt a PA-34 is going to get there every day in the year.

You could perhaps send more than one copy by diverse routes - of course there may not be time to make a copy:-) Even then I bet you can't do this for a few years or even one year without a delay of a few hours.

You could choose the airports for each trip based on the weather forecast but you don't wan't process surprises so you will need to practise each airport.

Do they really need to send all this data? Maybe some kind of diff would work instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff Maybe you are trying to solve the wrong problem?

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

I'm pretty sure my copy of "Computer Networks" said "truck" but I have lost it now and so I can't check. One of the best technical books I ever encountered.

jimjim1: My bad, but I forgot to state in my original post that this was a one off exercise. Thanks for the FedEx connection, this is exactly the situation I'm in. Due to the number of Terabytes, physical transport, even by bicycle if it were to be, is faster than the electronic variant.

Agree on the airports, although Southend might not be a bad option by train either. Fairoaks is another thought, partly due to based aircraft.
As for aircraft, there might by joy in using something like a PC-12. A good broker will give you aircraft options - don't forget that German operators could also be competitive on this.

Its only a 9 to 10 hour drive. What's the budget / cost of the downtime without the disks? I can't see that a charter aircraft would be that much quicker. Its probably two hours from pulling the disks to take off minimum. Say two hours in the air/taxiing/parking. Then customs attendance etc plus ground transport to site, so maybe 90 mins to 2 hours. That's only maybe 4 hours saved.

Thanks for all the responses.

The cost per hour of downtime in money isn't very large, the system however is critical to hundreds of companies around the world serving their customers, so this is about minimizing inconvenience.

I will go further with two options:
1. Chartering a smaller fast aircraft out of Biggin Hill
2. Flying business class out of LCY on BA or Lufthansa, which allows check-in as late as 20 mins before departure.

Thanks again !

Have you looked at going by train.

10:58 out of St Pancras, arrives 17:22 in Frankfurt. One change at Brussels

Sounds like a job for a Cessna 406. Air Taxi Europe are German they might be able to help they run car spares all over Europe.

If your data is that important, you must also ensure that your plan B involves keeping a local copy of the data in the datacenter where the data originates. If you're really talking about Petabytes (TBs can be transferred faster than you can fly them if you have enough cash) then the steps of shutting down services, copying data onto a backup, extracting the storage media, driving to the airport and flying, driving to the destination and inserting the storage media into your SAN or compute bubbles, will still take a long time.

This will be the third time I'm involved in such an exercise, although the physical distance is greater than previously.

At least two other copies of the data will exist in parallel to the data set being transferred.

Taking the snapshot of the data that is to travel, and likewise restoring back at the destination happens at the fastest speeds known in the industry, everything is connected to the SAN with fiber cables supporting upwards of 100 Gb/s.

Multiple plan Bs will be in place, the exercise can be aborted at any time.

If there are complications with customs, then there's not much we can do about that.

Re physical vs. electronic transfer: We're moving out of a data center that has limited bandwidth, and we're not investing in a higher bandwidth line just before leaving the center.

Re mirror site: This is indeed what we're doing. The exercise is about establishing an initial "slave" copy, that will then be kept in sync at all times. Only later will the actual system move over. This has to do with SQL Server Always On Clustering and log-shipping.