AWS Snow Family


  • Highly secure, portable devices to collect and process data at the edge, and migrate data into and out of AWS
    • Data migration: Snowcone, Snowball Edge, Snowmobile
    • Edge computing: Snowcone, Snowball Edge

Data Migration


Snowcone & Snowcone SSD

  • Small, portable computing, anywhere, rugged & secure, withstands harsh environments
  • Light (2.1kg) device used for edge computing, storage, and data transfer
    • Snowcone - 8 TB of HDD
    • Snowcone SSD - 14TB of SSD
  • Use Snowcone where Snowball does not fit (space-constrained environment)
  • Must provide battery/cables
  • Can be sent to AWS offline, or connected to the internet to use AWS DataSync to send data

Snowball Edge

  • Physical data transport solution to move TBs or PBs of data in or out of AWS
  • Alternative to moving data over the network
  • Pay per data transfer job
  • Provide block storage and S3-compatible object storage
    • Snowball Edge Storage Optimized
      • 80 TB of HDD
    • Snowball Edge Compute Optimized
      • 42 TB of HDD or 28TB NVMe

Snowmobile

  • Transfer EBs of data
  • Each Snowmobile has 100 PB of capacity
  • High security: temperature controlled, GPS, 24/7 video surveillance

Edge Computing


Snowcone & Snowcone SSD

  • 2 CPUs, 4 GB of memory, wired or wireless access
  • USB-C power using a cable or battery
  • Can run EC2 & Lambda (using AWS IoT Greengrass)

Snowball Edge

  • Snowball Edge Compute Optimized
    • 10 vCPUs, 416 GiB of RAM
    • Optional GPU
    • 28 TB NVMe or 42 TB HDD
    • Storage Clustering available (up to 16 nodes)
  • Snowball Edge Storage Optimized
    • Up to 40 vCPUs, 80 GiB of RAM, 80 TB storage
  • Can run EC2 & Lambda (using AWS IoT Greengrass)

AWS OpsHub


  • A software to manage Snow Family Devices
    • Unlocking and configuring single or clustered devices
    • Transferring files
    • Launching and managing instances running on Snow Family Devices
    • Monitor device metrics (storage capacity, active instances on devices)
    • Launch compatible AWS services on devices
      • e.g. EC2, DataSync, NFS

Solution Architecture


Snowball into Glacier

  • Snowball cannot import to Glacier directly
  • Import to S3 first, then use S3 lifecycle policy to move into Glacier

References