Cloud 9, a cloud storage service provider based in San Diego, has just announced that it is running out of money and will be shutting down operations soon. It has given all its clients fifteen (15) days to move their data out, either back to their own facility or to an alternative service provider.

Founded six years ago, Cloud 9 has since acquired 600 business clients, who use Cloud 9s infrastructure to store archived data. Among these clients, a few are large companies with several terabytes (TB) of data archived at Cloud 9, but on average each client company stores about 300 Gigabytes (GB) of data on Cloud 9s disk drives. Cloud 9s connection to the Internet is a Gigabit Ethernet line that has an effective aggregate transmission rate of 900 Mbps (900,000,000 bits per second).

To make your calculations easier, a few assumptions have been made as follows:

Cloud 9s Internet connection will be available 24 x 7 before the 15-day shutdown deadline.

Even if new funding could be arranged, there would be no time to add additional transmission lines to Cloud 9s facility before the deadline.

For regulatory compliance reasons, Cloud 9s clients cannot afford to lose their archived data, but none of them has a secondary backup copy of the data.

1 GB = 1,0243 Bytes = 1,073,741,824 Bytes

Questions:

If all of Cloud 9s clients start moving their data out at the beginning of the 15-day period by sharing Cloud 9s Internet connection, will there be enough time to move all the data out? Show your calculations.

What alternatives do Cloud 9s clients have, other than moving their data out over telecommunications lines?