Article written by Stork Aerospace, Aerospace news and articles
In 2015 Amazon unveiled Snowball, a physical appliance that was designed to speed up the transfer of data to Amazon’s cloud by providing a method to transfer 1PT of data at a time. Once the appliance was connected to the network and the data transferred, it was shipping to Amazon and then uploaded to the customers’ account. Amazon has now gone even further: Enter Snowmobile.
The snowmobile is a supersized version of Snowball. Now organizations that have extremely large amounts of data that need to be moved to the cloud have a faster and more secure method of doing so. The Snowmobile is a truck with a 45-foot container that will hold as much as 90PT at a time.
The basic specs of the container according to the Amazon press release are:
“Physically, Snowmobile is a ruggedized, tamper-resistant shipping container 45 feet long, 9.6 feet high, and 8 feet wide. It is water-proof, climate-controlled, and can be parked in a covered or uncovered area adjacent to your existing data center. Each Snowmobile consumes about 350 kW of AC power; if you don’t have sufficient capacity on site we can arrange for a generator.”
Amazon provides options for escorts and physical security for anyone with confidential or sensitive data. The process itself is as simple as the Snowball. The truck arrives and will need on-site power, or an additional generator. It is then connected to the network and the data transfer will begin. Once complete the truck will travel to the nearest AWS data center and upload the data.
