Using AWS Snowball Edge – Addressing Disconnected Scenarios with AWS Snow Family

Dec 20, 2023

Using AWS Snowball Edge – Addressing Disconnected Scenarios with AWS Snow Family

There is no longer a division between AWS Snowball and AWS Snowball Edge. Now, all such devices fall under the AWS Snowball Edge line, even if their intended use case is a straightforward data migration to S3.

There are four configurations with which an AWS Snowball Edge device can be ordered (see Figure 4.1):

	Storage Optimized w/80 TB	Compute Optimized Type 1	Compute Optimized Type 2 1 1 At the time of writing, this variant is limited to US-based regions only	Compute Optimized w/GPU
HDD in TB	80	39.5	39.5	39.5
SSD in TB	1	7.68	0	7.68
NVME in TB	0	0	28	0
VCPUs	24	52	104	52
VRAM in GB	80	208	416	208
GPU type	None	None	None	NVIDIA V100
10 Gbit RJ45	1	2	2	2
25 Gbit SFP	1	1	1	1
100 Gbit QSFP	1	1	1	1
Volume (in3)	5381	5381	5381	5381
Weight (lbs)	47	47	47	47
Power draw (avg)	304 w	304 w	304 w	304 w
Power draw (max)	1200 w	1200 w	1200 w	1200 w
Voltage range	100-240 v	100-240 v	100-240 v	100-240 v

Table 4.1 – Comparison of AWS Snowball Edge variants

The AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized variant is now used for data migrations in place of the old AWS Snowball. There is a local S3 endpoint to which files can be directly copied using AWS OpsHub, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or direct API commands from a script.

The local compute capacity can be used to host an AWS DataSync instance, an AWS Tape Gateway instance, an AWS File Gateway instance, or another instance that provides a different type of loading interface of your choosing.

Migrating data to the cloud

Table 4.2 illustrates how long migrations of varying sizes would take depending upon the network throughput:

	50 Mbps	100 Mbps	1 Gbps	2 Gbps	5 Gbps	10 Gbps	25 Gbps	40 Gbps	100 Gbps
50 Terabytes	3.3 months	1.7 months	5 days	2.5 days	1 day	12 hours	5 hours	3 hours	1 hour
500 Terabytes	2.8 years	1.4 years	1.7 months	25 days	10 days	5 days	2 days	1.25 days	12 hours
5 Petabytes	28.5 years	14.3 years	1.4 years	8.5 months	3.4 months	1.7 months	20 days	12 days	5 days
10 Petabytes	57 years	28.5 years	2.8 years	1.4 years	6.8 months	3.4 months	1.3 months	24 days	10 days

Table 4.2 – Comparison of migration times

Many organizations don’t have high-throughput internet connections that could be fully dedicated to migration. Nor do they have access to/familiarity with the techniques needed to fully utilize said connection once the latency gets above a few milliseconds.

This is why loading one or more devices connected to a local network and physically shipping to AWS is so popular – despite the days on either end the devices spend on a truck:

Figure 4.2 – An AWS Snowball Edge device being loaded with data

More Details