Help to transfer data to AWS by using a physical device. Common use case to copy TB to PB of data to AWS.
Snowball has computing and storage capability.
How Snowball Edge (SBE) work:
You start to request one or more snowball edge on AWS Management Console
AWS buckets, data, Amazon EC2 AMIs, Lambda functions to be configured before shipping to you
You receive the devices and setup manual IP or DHCP.
Unlock the device by using codes and Snowball client software. Codes and manifest is uniqued, you cannot use for other device.
Data copied to buckets is encrypted automatically.
All logistic and shipping is done by AWS
You can see the tracking information of the device via messages by Amazon SNS.
AWS Snowball is an AWS Service. Snowball Edge is a device. Originally, AWS Snowball is hardware but now AWS added compute capability to help SnowBall Edge can proceed some calculation at site without networking or connections.
SnowBall Edge types:
SnowBall Edge Compute Optimized: powerful compute, high speed storage for data processing before transferring to AWS. Typical workloads: machine learning, video processing, real-time processing.
52 vCPU, 208 GB RAM, 7.68TB of NVMe SSD, 42TB of HDD, 100 Gbps, nVidia V100.
SnowBall Edge Storage Optimized: General purpose analytics such as IoT data aggregation and transformation.
40 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, 80TB of HDD, 1TB of SATA SSD, 40 Gbps
You CANNOT use SnowBall Edge to migrate data from AWS Region to another AWS Region. In this case, you should consider to use S3 Cross-Region-Replication.
Transfer time estimation: around one week to transfer 80TB of data, including shipping and handling time at site.
SnowBall Edge must return in 360 days. You cannot borrow a device forever ^^
SnowBall Edge supports Clustering to create larger durable storage pool with single S3-compatible end point. Eg: 6 Storage optimized can be clustered to a single durable storage of 400TB. Or standalone performance of a storage optimized is 80TB.
You cannot use mixing of storage optimized and compute optimized for durable cluster.
You cannot use existing EBS for Snowball Edge.
Amazon EC2 on SnowBall Edge supports variety of free OS such as Ubuntu, CentOS. They can be pre-configured load to SBE without any modification. To run other OS, you need to provide licenses.
You can run multiple EC2 instances on the SBE as long as under device capacity.
AWS OpsHub is a member of Snow family that provides graphic user interface to manage SBE easily with no extra cost.
AWS OpsHub runs on a local machine such as your laptop to manage SBE devices.
OpsHub encrypted data while transferring to SBE. All data written to AWS Snow family is encrypted by default.
snowball edge
SBE Block Storage
You can add block storages to SBE
SBE block storage is different with Amazon EBS (only a subset of Amazon EBS).
Data on on the SBE block storage will be deleted when arrived to AWS. If you want to save the data, you should copy it to S3-compatible storage (this data will be copied to AWS S3 bucket when arrived to AWS).
You add SBE block storage after you received device from AWS.
SBE cannot be shipped to another Region. AWS shipped and used in single Region, you cannot use it or ship it to another Region.
Pricing
Data transfer In to AWS or S3 is free.
You will be charged for S3 storage
SBE service fee by use (total days of using). Also depends on type of SBE (compute or storage optimized or compute optimized with GPU)
SBE can support discount up to 62% if you have commitment of using 1 or 3 years. For this type, you have to contact sales team.
Service fee per job (10 days of onsite usage as default)
