Uncategorized / November 11, 2022

re:Invent 2016 – AWS Supersizes its Snowball Data Transfer Appliance Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy capped his re-Invent keynote Wednesday by rolling a 45-foot long truck onstage. He said, “Introducing AWS Snowmobile.” Snowmobile is the bigger brother to Snowball, AWS’ briefcase-sized data transfer device that was unveiled last year at the re:Invent conference. Snowball was created for organizations that need to move terabytes of data from their on-premises systems to the AWS cloud. Jassy explained that Snowmobile is for moving exabytes. AWS Snowmobile: Exabyte Scale Data Transport – Yes. It’s a truck! #AWS #reInvent pic.twitter.com/r9rwZJ8zuQ — AWS re:Invent (@AWSreInvent) November 30, 2016Upon a customer’s request, AWS will drive the massive Snowmobile container — it’s 45 feet long, eight feet wide and nearly 10 feet high, with capacity for up to 100PB of data at a time — to their location. AWS will connect the container to the customer’s network using the included cable. The customer will then be able to transfer their on-premises data to the Snowmobile and drive it back to AWS facilities. Jassy stated that it would take 26 years to move an exabyte worth of data from any location on the planet, including the cloud. It would take you less than six months to move 10 Snowmobiles. At Wednesday’s keynote, Jassy also introduced Snowmobile. The Snowball Edge, which costs $300, is a larger and more feature-richer version of Snowball. It is equipped with storage, compute, clustering, and storage capabilities. It also has four times the speed and twice the capacity of the original. “We are thrilled to introduce AWS Snowball Edge. This hybrid edge device is a true hybrid. It allows customers to transport 100TB of data in less time than a week. Snowball Edge also allows them to transfer data back-and-forth between the Snowball Edge and Amazon S3, to cluster Snowballs in an on-premises storage pool and to process data on the premises before shipping the Snowball Edge back back to AWS,” stated Bill Vass, vice president for Storage Services at AWS.