Introduction - AWS Snowball and Snowball Edge

Snowball is a transportation solution for migration of large quantities of data from one place to another via the Internet. Snowball can transfer petabytes from the legacy datacenter into the AWS cloud or from the cloud to offsite systems. It guarantees of transporting data faster than the internet speeds.

The appliances are used to execute workloads over data and the data is shipped in the appliances via a regional carrier. The appliance is a rugged shipping container that is complete only with E Ink Shipping labels. Terabytes and petabytes of data can be transferred between the on-premises data centers and Amazon Simple Storage Service. The data can be collected remotely and can be analyzed and then it can be moved to the Cloud.

Snowball appliances are been utilized by the AWS Snowball to deliver powerful interfaces that will allow the user to track the status of the jobs through to completion, transfer data and create jobs. By uploading the data to Snowball you can then transfer large amount faster than the internet which will save you a lot of time and money.

AWS Snowball:

Snowball solved the issue arising from the transportation of a large amount of data. Moving petabytes of data to the Cloud through Network connections just doesn’t seem to work out because of the slow-moving data and cost incurred. If the business has a T3 line and if it wants to move 100 TB then it will take 269 days just to move the entire data. Well, there are many businesses that have hundreds of TB data that they want to leverage in AWS cloud and there are some who are dealing with Petabytes so you must be getting the idea that how much cost and time will be required in moving data from on-premise to cloud.

Order Snowball device to move data and it will be shipped to you and then you have to connect it to your system. You can manage the transfer of the data and the snowball device makes sure that the data is encrypted and then you can ship the device to Amazon. Snowball can hold up to 80 TB of data and it just weighs 47 pounds.

You can export and import the data between the on-premise data and Amazon Simple Storage Service. Snowball contains 80 TB model which is available in all regions and 50 TB model is only available in US regions. The device is encrypted that will protect your data at physical transit and at rest. There is no need of buying hardware devices to store your data. Through AWS Snowball Management console or with the job management API you can manage the jobs. Local data transfer can be performed between the snowball and on-premise data where the snowball client will conduct this transfer which is a standalone downloadable client or the programmatically utilizing the Amazon S3 REST API calls with the downloadable Amazon S3 Adapter for Amazon Snowball. Snowball has its own shipping container with an E Ink display that changes when the snowball is ready to ship so that to show the shipping label. 

AWS Snowball Edge:

Snowball Edge is an enhanced version of Snowball with more features and functions. It holds more data than Snowball with holding a capacity of 100 TB and it can undertake local processing/edge computing workloads. Snowball Edge is designed to operate and withstand harsh environments with the necessity for cooling and it is also shock tested. Snowball Edge has passed all test including the HIPAA certified where it is also been rated by the government as able to use with data at the SCI/TS level. It can be used for local storage and compute where you can use one or even a cluster of these devices to leverage Amazon Web Services Computer Services like AWS Lambda in the environment even though if there is no Internet Connection.

Pricing:

You have to pay a service fee for per data transfer job with the applicable shipping charges. Each job consists usage of Snowball appliance for 10 days with onsite usage for free and there is a small charge for extra onsite days. Data that is transferred to Amazon Web Services does not incur any data transfer charges but the standard Amazon S3 pricing will be implemented.