big data

AWS Snowmobile – Move Exabytes of Data to the Cloud in Weeks

by Jeff Barr | on 30 NOV 2016 | in AWS Re:Invent, AWS Snowmobile, Enterprise | Permalink | Comments Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be! Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades. On the business side, adding new networking or better connectivity to data centers that are scheduled to be decommissioned after a migration is expensive and hard to justify.

Last year we announced the AWS Snowball (see AWS Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances for more information) as a step toward addressing large-scale data migrations. With 80 TB of storage, these appliances address the needs of many of our customers, and are in widespread use today. However, customers with exabyte-scale on-premises storage look at the 80 TB, do the math, and realize that an all-out data migration would still require lots of devices and some headache-inducing logistics.

Snowmobile in Action I don’t happen to have an exabyte-scale data center and I certainly don’t have room next to my house for a 45 foot long container. In order to illustrate the process of arranging for and using a Snowmobile, I sat down at my LEGO table and (in the finest Doc Brown tradition) built a scale model. I hope that you enjoy this brick-based story telling! Let’s start in your data center. It was built a while ago and is definitely showing its age. The racks are full of disk and tape drives of multiple vintages, each storing precious, mission-critical data. You and your colleagues spend too much time inside of the raised floor, tracking cables and trying to squeeze out just a bit more performance:



Snowmobile at DigitalGlobe Our friends at DigitalGlobe are using a Snowmobile to move 100 PB of satellite imagery to AWS. Here’s what Jay Littlepage (former Amazonian and now VP of Infrastructure & Operations at DigitalGlobe) has to say about this effort: Like many large enterprises, we are in the process of migrating IT operations from our data centers to AWS.

Our geospatial big data platform, GBDX, has been based in AWS since inception. But our unmatchable 16-year archive of high-resolution satellite imagery, visualizing 6 billion square kilometers of the Earth’s surface, has been stored within our facilities. We have slowly been migrating our archive to AWS but that process has been slow and inefficient. Our constellation of satellites generate more earth imagery each year (10 PB) than we have been able to migrate by these methods. We needed a solution that could move our 100 PB archive but could not find one until now with AWS Snowmobile. DigitalGlobe is currently migrating our entire raw imagery archive with one Snowmobile transfer directly into an Amazon Glacier Vault. AWS Snowmobile operators are providing an amazing customized service where they manage the configuration, monitoring, and logistics.

Using Snowmobile’s data transfer abilities will get our time-lapse imagery archive to the cloud more quickly, allowing our customers and partners to have access to uniquely massive data sets. By using AWS’ elastic computing platform within GBDX, we will run distributed image analysis, revealing the pace and pattern of world-wide change on an extraordinary scale, with unprecedented speed, in a more cost-effective manner – prioritizing insights over infrastructure. Without Snowmobile, we would not have been able to transfer our extremely large volume of data in such a short time or create new business opportunities for our customers. Snowmobile is truly a game changer!



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Diana Russo
Diana Russo

An efficient and reliable resource. They always remain flexible, cost effective, and lightning fast.