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back to article AWS shovels compute smarts into Snowball Edge. How about piling it into a Stack, eh?

Amazon has slipped some extra compute options into its Snowball Edge data transfer box. The original Snowball proposition was simple: pick up all your flakes of internet edge data, squash them together into a 50TB snowball, roll in more to make 80TB, and then a little more to make a 100TB one. Toss the snowball to an AWS data …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What’s the compute for?

    I can see a small amount of cpu being used for data transformation, but these are pretty decent sized boxes and realistically on-prem compute probably could have met the requirement in 99% of the cases anyway given the lead times for delivering the storage to AWS.

    If, on the other hand, it was meant for either wan optimisation or as a combination of sending a point in time snapshot to AWS and then using that to seed a rapid data migration, it might make sense.

    While there were reports of something to scare Cisco earlier this year, that’s more likely to scare Riverbed/Silver Peak....

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    1. Korev Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Re: What’s the compute for?

      I could see it being useful for remote scientific observations in areas with poor network. ie the images/videos/whatever get captured and then processed a bit before being driven to AWS. But that's definitely an edge case.

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    2. AceRimmer
      Reply Icon

      Re: What’s the compute for?

      Several use cases spring to mind:

      you already posses a number of lambda functions then it will save you the effort of having to rework them into your on premise kit.

      you are a consultancy sending a client a snowball and want to apply filtering to ensure they don't fill the machine with anything they don't want on there

      you are dealing with legacy equipment which is badly supported and need to lightly process the data before it hits S3

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      1. ntevanza
        Reply Icon

        Re: What’s the compute for?

        Or you are uploading processed data that's a fraction of the sized of the ingested data, and you built the solution in AWS by mistake.

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  2. Julz

    "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

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  3. DontFeedTheTrolls
    Boffin

    100TB? Pah!

    Exabytes Man! You've clearly never heard of the AWS Snowmobile

    0 0 Reply
  4. ntevanza

    "Come on, Amazon: build an AWS Stack... you know it makes sense. "

    Google AWS Outpost.

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