© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Colin Lazier, General Manager - AWS Import/Export & Amazon Glacier
October 2015
Introduction to
AWS Import/Export SnowballAccelerating Large-Scale Data Ingest
into AWS Storage Services
STG202
What to expect from the session
• What is AWS Import/Export Snowball?
• How does it work?
• What are the two most commonly asked Snowball
questions?
• How fast is that truck full of drives?
• How is my data transported securely?
• Where can it go?
• What does it cost?
• Demo
What is Snowball? Petabyte scale data transport
E-ink shipping
label
Ruggedized
case
“8.5G Impact”
All data encrypted
end-to-end50 TB
10G network
Rain & dust
resistant
Tamper-resistant
case & electronics
Question 1: You have heard of networks, right?
• Yes
• However, for certain use cases networks are:
Too slow
Inelastic
Too expensive
Question 1: You have heard of networks, right?
• Yes
• However, for certain use cases networks are:
Too slow
Inelastic
Too expensive
Bandwidth is growing
more slowly than
storage volumes
Question 1: You have heard of networks, right?
• Snowball
Fast
Elastic
Cost effective
10G network
50TB capacity
Question 1: You have heard of networks, right?
• Snowball
Fast
Elastic
Cost effective
10G network
50TB capacity
Question 1: You have heard of networks, right?
• Snowball
• Parallelize as needed
5X Snowballs
50G & 250TB
Question 2: Can I drop it?
• No (please don’t)
• Snowball is its own box
• Has had many drop tests already
• Can handle 8.5G impacts
• Designed for shipping
How fast is that truck full of drives?
• Less than 1 day to transfer 50TB via a 10G connection
with Snowball, less than 1 week including shipping
• Number of days to transfer 50TB via the internet at typical
utilizations
Internet Connection Speed
Utilization 1Gbps 500Mbps 300Mbps 150Mbps
25% 19 38 63 126
50% 9 19 32 63
75% 6 13 21 42
How fast is that truck full of drives?
• Less than 1 day to transfer 250TB via 5x10G connections
with 5 Snowballs, less than 1 week including shipping
• Number of days to transfer 250TB via the Internet at
typical utilizations
Internet Connection Speed
Utilization 1Gbps 500Mbps 300Mbps 150Mbps
25% 95 190 316 632
50% 47 95 158 316
75% 32 63 105 211
How is my data transported securely?
• 256-bit encryption
• Data is encrypted by the
Snowball client before it reaches
the Snowball appliance
• Keys are managed by KMS and
are never sent to the Snowball
How is my data transported securely?
• Strong chain of custody
• Tamper-resistant case
• Tamper-resistant electronics
(TPM)
• Each Snowball is erased
according to NIST 800-88 media
sanitization guidelines between
every job
From Where can it go?
Import to Amazon S3, Export coming soon
Amazon
EMRAmazon Redshift
Amazon S3
Amazon Glacier
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon RDSAmazon EBS
US-EAST-1
(Virginia)
US-WEST-2
(Oregon)
What does it cost?
• $200 / job plus shipping
• Includes 10 days to fill the device at your site
• $15/day after the tenth day on site
• Standard Amazon S3 charges apply
• $0.03/GB to transfer data out
• $0.00/GB to transfer data in
What does it cost?
Example 1:
• 40TB loaded on to 1 Snowball
• 2 days at your site
• $200 plus shipping
Example 2:
• 30TB loaded on to 1 Snowball
• 12 days at your site
• $200 + 2*$15/day = $230 plus shipping
What does it cost?
Example 3:
• 140TB loaded on to 3 Snowballs
• 8 days at your site
• 3 * $200 = $600 plus shipping
Example 4:
• 30TB exported on to 1 Snowball
• 8 days at your site
• $200 + 30TB * $0.03/GB = $1,121.60 plus shipping
Step 5: Connect client to the Snowball appliance
From a terminal:
snowball start -i 192.0.2.0 -m
/Downloads/JID2EXAMPLE-0c40-49a7-9f53-
916aEXAMPLE81-manifest.bin -u 12345-abcde-12345-
ABCDE-123
snowball start -i [Snowball IP Address] -m
[Path/to/manifest/file] -u [29 character unlock code]
Step 6: Copy your data
From terminal:
snowball cp --recursive /Logs/April
s3://MyBucket/Logs/April
snowball cp [options] [path/to/data/source]
s3://[path/to/data/destination]