Snow Product Family

Snowball, Snowball Edge and Snowmobile are designed to move very large amounts of data in and out of AWS and to collect and process data at the edge.

They’re useful if the amount of data is so huge that the time required would be long even with Dx. If it takes more than a week to transfer data, the Snow family is the way to go.

Snow devices are PHYSICAL devices, with the size of a suitcase or a truck.

To move data to AWS, you order them empty, you fill them with data and ship them back to AWS. To move data from AWS you select the data, AWS ships these storage devices, you move data and ship the devices back to AWS. This is not an instant process!

Data migration:

  • Snowcone

  • Snowball Edge

  • Snowmobile

Edge Computing:

  • Snowcone

  • Snowball Edge

Snowcone

Snowball Edge

Snowmobile

Storage Capacity

8TB HDD / 14TB SSD

80TB - 210 TB

< 100 PB

Migration Size

Up to 24 TB online/offline

Up to petabytes, offline

Up to exabytes, offline

DataSync agent

pre-installed

-

-

You can install the Snowball client on the servers or use the AWS OpsHub to manage data you need to migrate and connect compatible services.

Snowball to Glacier

Directly uploading to Amazon Glacier is not supported. What you can do is:

  1. Upload to S3

  2. Use a Lifecycle Policy to move to Glacier after the desired time period.

Snowcone

Snowcone is a small device (weigths about 2Kg) with limited capacity, it’s rugged and secure and can withstand harsh environments. It comes with the Data Sync Agent pre-installed.

It’s used for edge computing and storing data.

It comes in two flavors:

  • Snowcone – 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of memory, and 8 TB of hard disk drive (HDD) based storage.

  • Snowcone SSD – 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of memory, and 14 TB of solid state drive (SSD) based storage.

Network: 2x 1-10 Gbps RJ45.

You need to provide batteries and cabled, but it’s ideal for space-constrained environments.

To transfer data you can:

  • Ship the device

  • Use AWS DataSync

Snowball Edge

Comes with both storage and compute capabilities. Ideal if you need data processing on ingesting/exporting data.

Network: 10 Gbps (RJ45), 10/25 Gbps (SFP), 100 Gbps (QSFP+).

You pay per data transfer job. It provides block and S3-compatible storage.

Snowball Edge flavors

  • Storage Optimized: 80 TiB of HDD or 210 TiB of NVME for block or S3 storage.

    • Storage Optimized with EC2-compatible compute functionality: storage-optimized + 40 vCPUs, 80 GiB memory, 1TB SSD.

  • Compute Optimized: 42 TiB of HDD or 28 TiB of NVME for block or S3 storage + 104 vCPUs and 416 Gib memory.

  • Snowball Edge compute-optimized with GPU – This Snowball Edge device option is identical to the compute-optimized (with AMD EPYC Gen1) option and includes an installed graphics processing unit (GPU). The GPU is equivalent to the one available in the P3 Amazon EC2-compatible instance type.

Storage clustering up to 16 nodes is available. And you can run EC2 instances and Lambda Functions with AWS IoT Greengrass.

You have a long-term deployment option: 1 or 3 years at discounted price.

Snowball Edge Use Cases

  • Large data cloud migrations

  • Datacenter decommission

  • DR

  • Processing data before ingesting/exporting

Snowmobile

A portable datacenter within a shipping container on a truck.

It’s a special order, which takes longer to deliver, useful when you have a single location with huge amounts of data (> 10 PiB) to transfer. Also useful for datacenter migration.

You can have up to 100 PiB per Snowmobile. But you can use multiple so you can actually transfer Exabytes of data.

It is not economical for < 10 PiB or multisite (unless the data amount is > 10 PiB per site).