Amazon Snowball Edge is designed to provide enterprises with a fast and inexpensive device for transferring large amounts of data into and out of Amazon’s Web Services cloud platform. The AWS Snowball Edge device itself is a 100TB data transfer hardware component with on-board storage and compute capabilities.
Enterprises can connect apps and infrastructure in their data centers to the Snowball Edge, and the Edge can be used to move data into and out of AWS as well as temporarily store large data sets as part of a storage cluster or facilitate independent local workloads in remote locations when applications are not able to access the cloud, according to Amazon.
Snowball Edge keeps data secure both on-premises and while in transit to and from AWS via 256-bit encryption, tamper-resistant enclosures and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM). And Amazon Web Services Lambda code can be run on Snowball Edge devices to perform a variety of data management tasks.
Snowball Edge Arrives in Late 2016 as an Update to Amazon Snowball
Amazon introduced the Snowball Edge at its November AWS re:Invent 2016 conference in Las Vegas as a way to make it easier for enterprises to manage their corporate data, Internet of Things (IoT) data and Big Data, and to be able to seamlessly move this data to and from the Amazon cloud.
Amazon debuted the Snowball Edge as an update to its original Snowball storage container program. In addition to upping the storage capacity from 50TB to 100TB, the Snowball Edge was developed to address enterprise customers’ complaints regarding the lack of support for on-premises data management use cases wherein companies found themselves limited by data bandwidth and other constraints of cloud networks.
