Amazon Web Services - AWS

Snow Family

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Rohit Pagote
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Table of contents

Snow Family

  • Highly-secure, portable devices to collect and process data at the edge, and migrate data into and out of AWS

  • Offline devices to perform data migrations to Simple Storage Service (S3)

  • Takes around 2 weeks to transfer the data

  • Need to install OpsHub software on your computer to manage Snow Family devices

  • If it takes more than a week to transfer over the network, use Snowball devices!

Devices Types

Snowcone

  • 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, wired or wireless access

  • 8 TB storage

  • USB-C power using a cord or the optional battery

  • Good for space-constrained environment

  • DataSync Agent is preinstalled

  • Does not support Storage Clustering

Snowball Edge

  • Compute Optimized

    • 52 vCPUs, 208 GB of RAM

    • 42 TB storage

    • Optional GPU (useful for video processing or machine learning)

    • Supports Storage Clustering

  • Storage Optimized

    • Up to 40 CPUs, 80 GB of RAM

    • 80 TB storage

    • Supports Storage Clustering (up to 15 nodes)

    • Transfer up to petabytes

Snowmobile

  • 100 PB storage

  • Used when transferring > 10PB

  • Transfer up to exabytes

  • Does not support Storage Clustering

Usage Process/Data Migration

  1. Request Snowball devices from the AWS console for delivery

  2. Install the snowball client / AWS OpsHub on your servers

  3. Connect the snowball to your servers and copy files using the client

  4. Ship back the device when you’re done (goes to the right AWS facility)

  5. Data will be loaded into an S3 bucket

  6. Snowball is completely wiped

Edge Computing

  • Process data while it’s being created on an edge location (could be anything that doesn’t have internet or access to cloud like a truck on the road, a ship on the sea, a mining station underground, etc.)

  • Long-term deployment options for reduced cost (1 and 3 years discounted pricing)

  • Can run EC2 Instances & AWS Lambda functions locally on Snow device (using AWS loT Greengrass)

Solution Architecture: Snowball into Glacier

  • Snowball cannot import to Glacier directly

  • You must use Amazon S3 first, in combination with an S3 lifecycle policy

aws edge computingAWSaws snowfamily