AWS Snowball family is a data migration solution that offers support for the migration of terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes of on-premises data or workloads to Amazon Cloud. This migration support is believed to be safe and secure, with real-time monitoring and tracking but why would someone need it? Well, there can be an abundance of reasons. For example, can the data of any organization be collected by a monitoring station at a remote site and then transferred to the research center for further analysis or research? Or it could be so that the organization has decided to create a backup of its on-premises data in the Cloud to leverage Cloud agility and scalability. Whatever your reason may be, the answer is in the affirmative and there are various options available as described below.
Computing and storage device offerings from the AWS Snowball family
The first is the AWS Snowcone. It is the smallest member of the family, weighing 4.5 Lbs. it is approximately 9 In x 6 in x 3 in size. It has 2 CPUs, 4 GB RAM, and 8TB of usable storage. Small but high on performance.
The next member is AWS Snowball Edge. A rugged device with 104vCPUs, 416 GB RAM, and 210 TB of storage. It weighs around 49.7 pounds, is 15.5 In height, 10.6 In Width, and 28.3 In length.
Finally, there is Snowball Mobile, the biggest member of the family; it can help to transfer petabytes or exabytes of data quickly and securely in a matter of a few weeks.
What is cloud computing and how Snowball family can help?
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of IT resources over the internet with a pay-as-you-go model. However, there are regions where you don’t have access to the Internet. Similarly, any attempt to use your IT resources in the Cloud is just not possible in such remote places. In such challenging situations, Snowball family devices come to your rescue. These physical storage devices help you in migrating large amounts of data at very high speeds from your premises to Amazon storage. Moreover, through these Snowball family devices you can access the storage and compute power of AWS cloud locally and in a cost-effective way. And transfer Petabytes, Exabytes of data in and out of AWS Cloud without hassles.
