The AWS Import/Export team has announced today that they have expanded their functionality significantly by adding Import into Amazon EBS.

AWS Import/Export transfers data off of storage devices using Amazon's high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. With this new functionality AWS Import/Export now supports importing data directly into Amazon EBS snapshots. Once loaded into an Amazon EBS snapshot, The customer can create a volume based on that snapshot and attach it to an Amazon EC2 instance, or they can share that snapshot with others.

Amazon Import/Export is an important tool for customers to accelerate moving large amounts of data into the AWS storage systems. It is the proverbial "Do not underestimate the bandwidth of a Fedex box" but it are not only bandwidth constrained customers that are using the service, also those who have complex object collection layouts and who feel more comfortable writing it to a disk than transferring it over the network. With Import into EBS customers can now develop arbitrary complex layouts as the import service is doing a full binary copy of the disk into Amazon EBS and is not interpreting file system layouts, etc.

More information on AWS Import/Export can be found at their detail page.