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AWS Adds Options To Move Data to Its Cloud
As part of the run-up to its 2018 re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is introducing new ways for organizations to move vast amounts of their data to the AWS platform.
Some of these options expand on the existing AWS Snowball Edge data transfer appliance, which was first unveiled at the 2016 re:Invent. SnowBall Edge lets organizations move up to 100TB of data in a few days' time, and comes with built-in compute and storage. Since launching Snowball Edge, AWS has expanded the appliance's capabilities to include database migrations and support for EC2 instances.
On Monday, AWS announced the general availability of two new Snowball Edge appliances: Snowball Edge Compute Optimized and Snowball Edge Compute Optimized with GPU.
"Both options include 42 TB of S3-compatible storage and 7.68 TB of NVMe SSD storage, and allow you to run any combination of instances that consume up to 52 vCPUs and 208 GiB of memory," wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post announcing the new appliances. "The additional processing power gives you the ability to do even more types of processing at the edge."
The GPU-enabled version allows organizations to perform compute-intensive tasks such as "real-time full-motion video analysis & processing [and] machine learning inferencing," Barr said.
With the release of these two Snowball Edge appliances, AWS is renaming the original Snowball Edge to "Snowball Edge Storage Optimized."
In other AWS data transfer developments, the company has launched a new managed service called DataSync that aims to help organizations quickly transfer large volumes of data to and from the AWS cloud.
"AWS DataSync is built around a super-efficient, purpose-built data transfer protocol that can run 10 times as fast as open source data transfer," Barr wrote in a blog post Monday.
Organizations can use DataSync to perform one-time migrations, to transfer on-premises data to the cloud for analysis, or for regular data replications as part of their backup/recovery regimen.
Pricing for DataSync is on a per-GB basis. More information on the service is available here.