AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale edge computing and data transport device that includes integrated computing and storage capabilities and is available in two options. The optimized Snowball Edge Storage devices offer block storage and object storage compatible with Amazon S3, in addition to 40 vCPUs. AWS Snowball is a service that speeds up the transfer of large amounts of data to and from the cloud through physical storage devices, without the need to use the Internet. These physical storage devices transfer data faster than the Internet through regional carriers, and include shipping labels with electronic ink.
This data is then transferred to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S). Once the data is transferred to Cloud Storage, you can use several technologies to process the new files as they arrive, such as Dataflow. Snowball is simple, fast, and secure, and can cost as little as one-fifth of what it costs to transfer data over the high-speed Internet. The storage transfer service is a fully managed and highly scalable service for automating transfers from other public clouds to cloud storage.
As mentioned earlier, you may need to consider whether the cost of achieving lower latencies in data transfer (for example, acquiring network bandwidth) is offset by the value of that investment for your organization. To set up the Storage Transfer Service for local data, install local software (known as agents) on the computers in your data center. For large-scale data transfers (with petabytes of data and billions of files), a reference latent error rate of the underlying source storage system as low as 0.0001% continues to result in data loss of thousands of files and gigabytes.
