Amazon polishes its Snowball edge storage devices with three upgrades
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this month pushed out three upgrades to its AWS Snowball edge products. The debuts increased transfer speed, added security management, and gave buyers a new graphical user interface for easier device workload management.
The Snowball is a petabyte-scale data migration and edge computing device sold as either storage or compute-optimized. It is part of Amazon’s Snow product line, which also includes the Snowmobile, a 45-foot edge trailer introduced in 2016.
Amazon said the Snowball storage-optimized device now transfers petabytes of data to Amazon Web Services 25% faster than its predecessor.
The Snowball also now supports local Amazon Web Services’ identity and access management capabilities. The upgrade gives IT managers finer control over who can use the devices and how. Amazon said that previously, anyone with an unlock code and manifest file had complete control of the Snowball.
Finally, Amazon wrote a graphical user interface for the Snowball. The interface is intended to make it easier and quicker to mix edge computing workloads and to simplify the migration of data to AWS. Operators previously entered commands into a command line interface or by using an API that uses just four fundamental HTTP requests to act on data: get, put, post, and delete.
Snowball on the edge continuum
To understand the relevance of the Snowball announcements to the edge computing market, it’s worth noting where Snow Family products, including Snowball storage and Snowball edge compute-optimized devices, fit into the edge landscape and the rest of AWS’ portfolio. Snow Family products are located at the device edge/edge gateway on the edge computing spectrum.
According to AWS, these products are for “customers that need to run operations in austere, non-data center environments, and in locations where there’s lack of consistent network connectivity.” They serve to facilitate the movement of data in to and out of AWS services and are owned and managed by AWS.
These devices are complementary to other edge compute and storage services from AWS. AWS Local Zone and AWS Outposts also seek to move compute and storage capabilities closer to end users but would be located in either third-party or enterprise datacenters instead of harsh on-site environments.
Article Topics
AWS | edge storage | IoT
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