You probably have the same question that a lot of other people have: What is a snowmobile, and why would Amazon launch an initiative to build them? The answer is pretty simple.
A Snowmobile is essentially a mobile data center with wheels. These are giant refrigerated semi-trucks that contain racks of servers and networking equipment.
They’re powered by diesel generators in case of an outage, and they can work in remote locations without being connected to the internet.
The idea behind these Snowmobiles is that they’ll make it cheaper for AWS to deploy new data centers in remote locations rather than operating them from centralized locations.
It sounds like a great plan, but what happens if you take the concept of the Snowmobile and put it into practice?
Let’s look at AWS’s implementation of their own mobile data centers.
- What is an AWS Snowmobile?
- How does AWS Snowmobile Works?
- Who should use Snowmobile?
- Site requirements of Snowmobile
- Specifications of Snowmobile
- How much data can be transferred using Snowmobile?
- How is Snowmobile Powered?
- AWS Snowmobile Pricing
- Snowmobile vs Snowball
- Conclusion
What is a AWS Snowmobile?
AWS Snowmobile is an enormous truck-sized mobile data center that’s used to quickly deploy new AWS Cloud services in locations where it would be too expensive to run them from a centralized data center.
AWS Snowmobile is first exabyte-scale data migration service that allows to move very large datasets from on-premises to AWS.
Each snowmobile has 100 PB storage capacity which can be dispatched at an org site and get connected to the site network for high speed data migration.
An exabyte of data can be migrated using 10 snowmobiles in parallel from a single location or multiple data centers.
A single Snowmobile is about the size of a semi-truck, and it contains about 80 racks of servers, networking equipment and cooling infrastructure.
The Snowmobile itself is powered by diesel generators in case of an outage, and it can work in remote locations without being connected to the internet.
How does AWS Snowmobile works?
Once you put an inquiry for snowmobile, AWS personnel will contact you for your specific storage requirements.
AWS personnel then drive to your site and connect the snowmobile to your local site network for high speed connection and migrate the data from your local storage servers to snowmobile.
Once data transfer is completed, the snowmobile will drive back to designated data center and the transferred data will be uploaded to your selected storage services, like S3 or Glacier.
Then they will validate with you for successful uploading of your data on data centers.
Who Should Use Snowmobile?
If you are migrating exabytes of data sets from on-prem local servers to AWS data centers you should use snowmobile.
Ex: 1. Migrating 100’s of peta bytes of data such as video library, genomic sequences, seismic data, satellite images..
2. Shutting down legacy data centers and moving all exabytes of data to AWS.
3. Migrating financial records to run Big Data Analytics on AWS
Site requirements of AWS Snowmobile
Snowmobile needs physical access to your data center for network connectivity. it comes with removable connector rack with upto 2 kilometers.
Snowmobile can be parked in an covered area of your data center or uncovered area closest to your data center. keeping the removable connector rack length in mind.
The parking area needs to hold a standard 45-foot High Cube trailer with a minimum of 6’-0” (1.83m) of peripheral clearance.
Snowmobile can operate at ambient temperatures up to 85F (29.4C) before an auxiliary chiller unit is required.
AWS will provide the auxiliary chiller if needed based on the site survey findings.
Specifications of AWS Snowmobile
Each Snowmobile comes with up to 100PB of storage capacity housed in a 45-foot long High Cube shipping container.
The container measures 8 foot wide, 9.6 foot tall and has a curb weight of approximately 68,000 pounds.
The ruggedized shipping container is tamper-resistant, water-resistant, temperature controlled, and GPS-tracked.
How much data can be transferred using AWS snowmobile?
Each Snowmobile has 100 petabytes capacity and multiple Snowmobiles can be used in parallel to transfer exabytes of data.
How is snowmobile powered?
A fully powered Snowmobile requires ~350KW.
If your site is sufficient to provide this power, you are good. Otherwise, AWS can dispatch a separate generator set along with the Snowmobile if your site permits such generator use.
This generator set consumes same parking space as 45 foot container trailer.
AWS Snowmobile Pricing
Snowmobile jobs cost $0.005/GB/month based on the amount of provisioned Snowmobile storage capacity and the end to end duration of the job.
The job starts when a Snowmobile departs an AWS data center for delivery to the time when data ingestion into AWS is complete.
Snowmobile vs Snowball
You might be wondering if the Snowmobile is different from a snowball, which is AWS’s other option for deploying a data center somewhere remote.
The short answer is that a snowball is smaller than a Snowmobile,
With Snowmobile you migrate large datasets of 10PB or more in a single location. For datasets less than 10PB or distributed in multiple locations, you should use Snowball.
In addition, If you have a high speed backbone with hundreds of Gb/s of spare throughput, then you can use Snowmobile to migrate the large datasets all at once.
If you have limited bandwidth on your backbone, you should consider using multiple Snowballs to migrate the data incrementally.
Conclusion
AWS snowmobile is used by companies with exabytes /more volume datasets migrating to AWS.
Data transferred with Snowmobile is more secure, fast and cost effective.
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