Snowball, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile
These belong to the same product category or family for the physical transfer of data between business operating locations and AWS. To move a large amount of data into and out of AWS, you can use any of the three:
- Snowball: This physical device can be ordered from AWS by logging a job. AWS delivers a device for you to load your data onto before sending it back. Data in Snowball is encrypted using KMS. It comes with two capacity ranges: 50 TB and 80 TB. It is economical to order one or more Snowball devices for data between 10 TB and 10 PB. The device can be sent to different premises. It does not have any compute capability; it only comes with storage capability.
- Snowball Edge: This is like Snowball, but it comes with both storage and compute capability. It has a larger capacity than Snowball. It offers fastened networking, such as 10 Gbps over RJ45, 10/25 Gb over SFP28, and 40/100 Gb+ over QSFP+ copper. This is ideal for the secure and quick transfer of terabytes to petabytes of data into AWS.
- Snowmobile: This is a portable data center within a shipping container on a truck. It allows you to move exabytes of data from on-premises to AWS. If your data size exceeds 10 PB, then Snowmobile is preferred. Essentially, upon requesting to use the Snowmobile service, a truck is driven to your location and you plug your data center into the truck and transfer the data. If you have multiple sites, choosing Snowmobile for data transfer is not an ideal option.
AWS DataSync
AWS DataSync is designed to move data from on-premises storage to AWS, or vice versa:
- It is an ideal product from AWS for data processing transfers, archival or cost-effective storage, disaster recovery, business continuity, and data migrations.
- It has a special data validation feature that verifies the original data with the data in AWS, as soon as the data arrives in AWS. In other words, it checks the integrity of the data.
- To understand this product in depth, consider an example of an on-premises data center that has SAN/NAS storage. When you run the AWS DataSync agent on a VMWare platform, this agent is capable of communicating with the NAS/SAN storage via an NFS/SMB protocol. Once it is on, it communicates with the AWS DataSync endpoint, and from there, it can connect with several different types of locations, including various S3 storage classes or VPC-based resources, such as Elastic File System (EFS) and FSx for Windows Server.
- It allows you to schedule data transfers during specific periods. By configuring the built-in bandwidth throttle, you can limit the amount of network bandwidth that DataSync uses.
