Storage - What is the Snow Family?

Question 1

What is the Snow family?

Answer 1

• Range of physical hardware devices for data transfer
• Enables transferring data into AWS from the edge or beyond the Cloud
• Can also be used to transfer data out of AWS

Question 2

How does the Snow family perform data transfer?

Answer 2

• AWS sends a hardware device packed with storage and compute capabilities
• Data transfer is performed outside of AWS
• Device is then sent back to AWS for processing and data upload to Amazon S3

Question 3

What is the range of data transfer capacity offered by the Snow family?

Answer 3

• From a few terabytes using AWS Snowcone
• Up to 100 petabytes using AWS Snowmobile

Question 4

Why is traditional network connectivity not feasible for large-scale data transfers?

Answer 4

• Transferring large amounts of data over network connections is time-consuming
• Example: Transferring 1 petabyte over 1 Gbps using Direct Connect would take over 100 days

Question 5

What additional capabilities do some devices in the Snow family offer?

Answer 5

• Some devices have compute power for running EC2 instances
• Enables running applications in remote and difficult-to-reach environments
• Useful for processing and analyzing data closer to the source

Question 6

What are the devices in the Snow family?

Answer 6

• Snowcone (smallest device)
• Snowball (compute optimized, compute optimized with GPU, and storage optimized)
• Snowmobile (largest device)

Question 7

What are the different use cases for the Snowball options?

Answer 7

• Compute optimized: Suitable for running compute-intensive applications
• Compute optimized with GPU: Ideal for applications requiring GPU acceleration
• Storage optimized: Designed for high-capacity data storage and transfer

Question 8

What is the physical size of the Snow devices?

Answer 8

• Snowcone: Smallest size
• Snowball: Same size for all options (compute optimized, compute optimized with GPU, and storage optimized)
• Snowmobile: Largest size