Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched its data transfer appliance, called Snowball, in Australia. The appliance is part of a holistic service offered by AWS to ease the pain and network demands involved in transferring on-premise data onto the cloud. Here’s what this 23kg ‘suitcase’ can do.
Australian organisations that have housed data in their own datacentres are likely investigating options to migrate a chunk of that data to the cloud to lower total cost of ownership (TOC) or they simply want to be more nimble in the way they operate. Unfortunately, Australia doesn’t exactly have the best broadband network in the world and even those on business fibre broadband plans may not want to saturate their network while migrating data to the cloud.
Snowball exists to simply the process the old fashioned way: a Snowball unit, which resembles a suitcase, can be couriered out to your organisation and you can transfer up to 80TB worth of data onto it. It has a 10GB network connection and data is encrypted as it is transferred onto the appliance. Once the data that is destined for the AWS cloud is on-board, the unit is then shipped back. AWS staff then decrypt and copy the data into designated Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets that you’ve specified.
There a $230 upfront cost to hire the appliance and then an ongoing fee for every day that it is on-site. The Snowball also incorporates tamper-resistant enclosures and end-to-end tracking.
According to AWS head of architecture for Asia-Pacific Glenn Gore, the company has already signed its first Snowball customer in Australia: Bauer Media Group. Speaking at a media panel at the AWS Summit 2016 in Sydney, he said the Snowball is an appealing proposition for Australian organisations.
“With the cost of networks and how geographically spread out we are, shipping a Snowball around makes a lot of sense to our customers,” he said.
You can find out more about the AWS Snowball over on the company’s official website.
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