Home Enterprise AWS Snowball Edge Update

AWS Snowball Edge Update

by Juan Mulford
AWS Snowball Edge

This week AWS has announced an update of its edge computing and data migration device, the AWS Snowball Edge. This Amazon solution was presented late in 2016 as an update to its original Snowball storage container program. AWS Snowball Edge is part of the AWS Snow Family. Snow Edge devices come in two options: Snowball Edge Storage Optimized and Snowball Edge Compute Optimized. This solution aims to make it easier for enterprises to manage their corporate data, Internet of Things (IoT) data and Big Data, and to be able to move this data to and from AWS seamlessly.

This week AWS has announced an update of its edge computing and data migration device, the AWS Snowball Edge. This Amazon solution was presented late in 2016 as an update to its original Snowball storage container program. AWS Snowball Edge is part of the AWS Snow Family. Snow Edge devices come in two options: Snowball Edge Storage Optimized and Snowball Edge Compute Optimized. This solution aims to make it easier for enterprises to manage their corporate data, Internet of Things (IoT) data and Big Data, and to be able to move this data to and from AWS seamlessly.

AWS Snowball Edge

Enterprise customers regularly complain about the lack of support for on-premises data management use cases in which companies found themselves limited by data bandwidth and other constraints of cloud networks. Amazon, looking to improve its earlier solution, claims that the new storage optimized devices are 25% faster, with more memory, more vCPUs, and support for 100 Gigabit networking. This improved data transfer speed is made possible by a new 100 Gigabit QSFP28 network adapter.

Amazon said that the newest Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices feature both block storage and Amazon S3-compatible object storage. And now 40 vCPUs, and 80GB of memory. Also, the processor runs at 3.2 GHz, allowing users to launch more powerful EC2 instances that can improve the preprocessing and analytics workloads. In regards to storage, there is now 1TB of SATA SSD that is accessible to the EC2 instances that are launched on the device. These devices are well suited for local storage and large-scale data transfer.

Other relevant AWS Snowball Edge Updates include:

  • AWS OpsHub for Snow Family: A new GUI-based tool to simplify the management of Snowball Edge devices.
  • IAM for Snowball Edge: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can now be used to manage access to services and resources on Snowball Edge devices.
  • Snowball Edge Support for AWS Systems Manager: Support for task automation to simplify common maintenance and deployment tasks on instances and other resources on Snowball Edge devices.

Amazon Snow Family

Discuss on Reddit

Engage with StorageReview

Newsletter | YouTube | Podcast iTunes/Spotify | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | RSS Feed