
Snowball Edge – Petabyte-scale data transport with on-board storage and compute - irs
https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/
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Veratyr
The benefits aren't entirely clear.

> Many organizations are concerned that once they have moved all their data to
> the cloud it will be both expensive and time-consuming to retrieve the data
> if needed. Snowball Edge offers all customers a fast and inexpensive way to
> transfer large amounts of data both into and out of AWS.

Ingress to S3 is already free, the biggest problem is egress and that's left
quite ambiguous. The pricing page points back to S3, which says "it depends".
Where exactly does Snowball go within AWS itself? Is it classified as EC2? Is
egress to the snowball free if it's in the same region as the data? Can the
region be chosen?

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extra88
Data transfers are always between the Snowball box and S3 storage. There's a
flat per-transfer fee of $250 in addition to data transfer charges ($200 for
the smaller model). Data Snowball->S3 is free, data S3->Snowball depends on
which Region the S3 storage is in, everywhere except Asia, it's $0.03/GB.
There's also physical shipping charges for the Snowball box.

[https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/)

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mbreese
This is a somewhat odd use-case, but does anyone know - do you __have __to
transfer the data to S3? What if I just needed an extra 100-300TB of local
storage for 10 days? Let 's say for a backup during a move, or something like
that. The description reads like this is possible, even if it's an unusual way
to use the device.

~~~
cbo100
Based on the Philips customer use case on the front page, it seems it would
work for this use case.

Sounds like they are using it as a "AWS Cloud in a box" type thing with no
intention of returning it to AWS.

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prashnts
> All encryption is performed on the device itself

Mm. This could be a MITM/"tap" attack vector, I guess?

[*] [https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-
edge/details/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/details/)

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roryisok
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there's some sort of amazon event
on today

~~~
Dunedan
Well, it's _the_ Amazon event of the year, the annual AWS re:Invent:
[http://reinvent.awsevents.com/](http://reinvent.awsevents.com/)

