Amazon have a service called AWS Snowball, but if you’re importing a large dataset into the cloud, 80TB might simply not be enough. So now you can upgrade your transfers using their new AWS Snowmobile service. For some Christmas has just arrived early.
This is not some mere plastic shipping crate surrounding a NAS unit, but something a little more substantial. They’re going to need a bigger box..
What’s in the Snowmobile box?
The Amazon Snowmobile is a large 45′ standard shipping container, but operates in the same way as a Snowball. Amazon transport it to your data-centre, linked via fibre, and transfer the data. It is then towed back to Amazon, and the data transferred to the cloud from there. But the box is no ordinary shipping container, it has inside the ability to store 100PB of data. It comes with GPS tracking, 24/7 video surveillance, and alarm monitoring. On top of that, physical security controls and dedicated security personal and optional escort vehicle round out security.
With this process Amazon expect to cut the time to move an Exabyte of data (1×1018 bytes) from an estimated 26 years using a 10Gb/s connection to less than 6 months using 10 Snowmobiles. Snowmobile uses multiple 40Gb/s connections to connect to your datacenter, to provide upto 1Tb/s of bandwidth. At this speed you fill a Snowmobile in 10 days. As well as fast network connections, you’ll also need 350Kw of power to support the equipment inside.
It’s not cheap, despite a $0.005Gb/month price tag
“Snowmobile pricing is based on the amount of data stored on the truck per month.” – AWS Snowmobile Pricing
Needless to say, although this is a GA product, it’s not something you’re going to order on a whim. Even at $0.005 per GB/month, (or $5 per TB/month, or $5,000 per PB/month) the cost of a fully equipped Snowmobile will end up being $500,000 per month. This is not a unit you want hanging around, so project planning is essential to ensure you use it properly and minimise data migration cost.
But if you are looking to move Petabytes (or even Exabytes) of data to the cloud from your own environment, then this is a good way of achieving it. Some organisations are collecting data quicker than they can upload to the cloud. The Amazon Snowmobile allows these to move from on-premises storage to cloud (or back).
Snowball adds compute, allows remote working.
Amazon also launched the Snowball Edge, a 100TB storage module. This form storage clusters by interlinking them, providing larger capacities. They contain embedded compute capability (equivalent to an AWS m4.4xl instance). This allows you to deploy Amazon cloud capabilities almost anywhere, as the analytics run in the box. Some examples are remote geographic or scientific data collection, wind-farm data analysis. This allows for some data such as alerts to be communicated on low bandwidth links, but for the full data to be retained and accessed in the cloud once the Snowball Edge has been assimilated.
