AWS Snow Family (Move Terabytes, Petabytes, Exabytes of Data to the Cloud)

AWS Snow Family

AWS Snow Family is a collection of physical devices that help to migrate large amounts (terabytes or petabytes or exabytes) of data into the cloud without depending on networks/Internet. AWS Snow Family services help physically import/export of data securely and quickly to AWS.

Use cases

  • Large data transfer during cloud migration.
  • On-premises data backup for disaster recovery.
  • Data center relocation and/or remote data collection.
  • Physically isolated environment where high-speed Internet connections are not available.

AWS Snowball

AWS Snowball is a service that provides secure, rugged devices to transfer(import/export) large amounts of data between Amazon S3 and your on-premises data centers.

Snowball Features

  • Snowball helps to transfer a large amount of data, Amazon provides a physical snowball device that transfers data faster than the internet.
  • It comes in two size:80 TB and 50 TB.
  • It provides encryption to protect your data at rest and in physical transit.
  • Snowball might not be the right choice, if you want to transfer data less than 10 TB.
  • You can perform local data transfers between your on-premises data center and a Snowball.
  • You can manage your jobs through the AWS Snowball Management Console.

AWS Snowball Edge

Snowball Edge is a 100TB data transfer device with AWS computing and storage capabilities. Snowball Edge device comes with two options: Compute Optimized and Storage Optimized.

  • Snowball Edge Storage Optimized: This device provides around 40 vCPUs with 80 TB of usable block or object storage.
  • Snowball Edge Compute Optimized: This device provides around 52 vCPUs, 42 TB of usable block or object storage, and an optional GPU.

AWS Snowball Edge Features

  • Snowball is a 100TB data transfer device that can transport data faster than the internet.
  • It contains Network adapters with transfer speeds of up to 100 GB/second.
  • It supports Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 endpoints that enable the programmatic use cases.
  • It supports to write and run Lambda functions.
  • It allows you to cluster Snowball Edge devices for local storage and compute jobs to achieve 99.999% data durability across 5–10 devices and also ensures to run your application locally, even when they are not able to access the cloud.
  • It provides a file interface to read and write data to an AWS Snowball Edge device through a file share or Network File System (NFS) mount point.

AWS Snowmobile

AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service that enables customers to quickly migrate a large amount of data from on-premises to AWS with secure, fast, and cost-effective manner.

  • You can transfer 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck.
  • It is ideal for multi-petabyte or Exabyte-scale data (such as video libraries, genomic sequences, seismic data, satellite images) migrations or a complete migration of data center.
  • It is tamper-resistant, waterproof, and temperature controlled with multiple layers of logical and physical security — including encryption, fire suppression, dedicated security personnel, GPS tracking, alarm monitoring, 24/7 video surveillance, and an escort security vehicle during transit.

Image via [https://aws.amazon.com/snow/?nc=sn&loc=1 ]

AWS Snow Family (Move Terabytes, Petabytes, Exabytes of Data to the Cloud)
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