AWS Snowball
Nov 5, 2022
# Snowball
- AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud. Using Snowball addresses common challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Transferring data with Snowball is simple, fast, secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of high-speed Internet. The Snowball devices literally look like massive desktop computers and are physically delivered to you for the data transfer process.
- Snowball is a strong choice for data transfer if you need to more securely and quickly transfer terabytes to many petabytes of data to AWS. Snowball can also be the right choice if you don’t want to make expensive upgrades to your network infra, if you frequently experience large backlogs of data, if you’re located in a physically isolated environment, or if you’re in an area where high-speed Internet connections are not available or cost-prohibitive.
- As a rule of thumb, if it takes more than one week to upload your data to AWS using the spare capacity of your existing Internet connection, then you should consider using Snowball. For example, if you have a 100 Mb connection that you can solely dedicate to transferring your data and need to transfer 100 TB of data, it takes more than 100 days to complete data transfer over that connection. You can make the same transfer by using multiple Snowballs in about a week.