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Snowball Edge – Petabyte-scale data transport with on-board storage and compute

60 points by irs 10y ago

roryisok 10y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there's some sort of amazon event on today
- Dunedan 10y ago
  Well, it's _the_ Amazon event of the year, the annual AWS re:Invent: http://reinvent.awsevents.com/ http://reinvent.awsevents.com/
- miyuru 10y ago
  I was wondering the same, many new amazon products poping up on HN
Veratyr 10y ago
The benefits aren't entirely clear. > Many organizations are concerned that once they have moved all their data to the cloud it will be both expensive and time-consuming to retrieve the data if needed. Snowball Edge offers all customers a fast and inexpensive way to transfer large amounts of data both into and out of AWS. Ingress to S3 is already free, the biggest problem is egress and that's left quite ambiguous. The pricing page points back to S3, which says "it depends". Where exactly does Snowball go within AWS itself? Is it classified as EC2? Is egress to the snowball free if it's in the same region as the data? Can the region be chosen?
- bpicolo 10y ago
  It's not free from your network perspective, and typically this much data would take a lot longer to throw over the net.
- koolba 10y ago
  Ingress to S3 is only free if your time is free and you have no deadline. Imagine migrating a a business built atop lots of local data (say movies or massive amounts of pictures).
- extra88 10y ago
  Data transfers are always between the Snowball box and S3 storage. There's a flat per-transfer fee of $250 in addition to data transfer charges ($200 for the smaller model). Data Snowball->S3 is free, data S3->Snowball depends on which Region the S3 storage is in, everywhere except Asia, it's $0.03/GB. There's also physical shipping charges for the Snowball box. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/
mbreese 10y ago
This is a somewhat odd use-case, but does anyone know - do you have to transfer the data to S3? What if I just needed an extra 100-300TB of local storage for 10 days? Let's say for a backup during a move, or something like that. The description reads like this is possible, even if it's an unusual way to use the device.
- cbo100 10y ago
  Based on the Philips customer use case on the front page, it seems it would work for this use case. Sounds like they are using it as a "AWS Cloud in a box" type thing with no intention of returning it to AWS.
prashnts 10y ago
> All encryption is performed on the device itself Mm. This could be a MITM/"tap" attack vector, I guess? [*] https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/details/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/details/

60 points by irs 10y ago

roryisok 10y ago

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there's some sort of amazon event on today

Dunedan 10y ago
Well, it's _the_ Amazon event of the year, the annual AWS re:Invent: http://reinvent.awsevents.com/ http://reinvent.awsevents.com/
miyuru 10y ago
I was wondering the same, many new amazon products poping up on HN

Veratyr 10y ago

The benefits aren't entirely clear. > Many organizations are concerned that once they have moved all their data to the cloud it will be both expensive and time-consuming to retrieve the data if needed. Snowball Edge offers all customers a fast and inexpensive way to transfer large amounts of data both into and out of AWS. Ingress to S3 is already free, the biggest problem is egress and that's left quite ambiguous. The pricing page points back to S3, which says "it depends". Where exactly does Snowball go within AWS itself? Is it classified as EC2? Is egress to the snowball free if it's in the same region as the data? Can the region be chosen?

bpicolo 10y ago
It's not free from your network perspective, and typically this much data would take a lot longer to throw over the net.
koolba 10y ago
Ingress to S3 is only free if your time is free and you have no deadline. Imagine migrating a a business built atop lots of local data (say movies or massive amounts of pictures).
extra88 10y ago
Data transfers are always between the Snowball box and S3 storage. There's a flat per-transfer fee of $250 in addition to data transfer charges ($200 for the smaller model). Data Snowball->S3 is free, data S3->Snowball depends on which Region the S3 storage is in, everywhere except Asia, it's $0.03/GB. There's also physical shipping charges for the Snowball box. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/

mbreese 10y ago

This is a somewhat odd use-case, but does anyone know - do you have to transfer the data to S3? What if I just needed an extra 100-300TB of local storage for 10 days? Let's say for a backup during a move, or something like that. The description reads like this is possible, even if it's an unusual way to use the device.

cbo100 10y ago
Based on the Philips customer use case on the front page, it seems it would work for this use case. Sounds like they are using it as a "AWS Cloud in a box" type thing with no intention of returning it to AWS.

prashnts 10y ago

> All encryption is performed on the device itself Mm. This could be a MITM/"tap" attack vector, I guess? [*] https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/details/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/details/