AWS Snow Family Now Supports Remote Monitoring and Operations

AWS Snowball customers can now manage their connected Snowball Edge devices remotely. IT Pros can now operate these devices from AWS OpsHub or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), even when these devices are geographically dispersed.

The AWS Snow Family is designed for business customers that need computing power and storage in non-data center environments where there is often a lack of consistent network connectivity. AWS Snow Family devices are owned and managed by Amazon Web Services, and they integrate with the AWS cloud.

Previously, businesses were only able to manage Snowball devices that were physically present on their local network. As these businesses expanded the number of sites where they deployed Snowball devices, they needed a scalable way to manage them from a central location.

AWS Snow Family remote monitoring and management now enables customers to remotely view a central dashboard and see whether a device is online or unlocked, and monitor usage metrics such as available storage and compute capacity. In addition, customers can remotely unlock or reboot devices deployed remotely.

You can manage from one to thousands of AWS Snow Family devices from AWS OpsHub or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). The remote management features can be turned on when first ordering a Snowball Edge device or after it’s deployed on-site. Once the remote management feature is turned on and the device has an Internet connection, it will automatically create a secure connection to the AWS Cloud and begin sending device status information.

AWS Snowball Device Differences

The AWS Snow Family is comprised of AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile.

• AWS Snowcone: A very small, ultra-portable rugged edge computing device designed to collect, process, and move data from disconnected environments to AWS. It’s intended to address an organization’s need to move data capture, processing, and analysis closer to the end users.
• AWS Snowball: It’s available in two device types designed to support edge computing. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized has more computing capabilities and is suited for higher performance workloads, and Snowball Edge Storage Optimized which has more storage and is suited for large-scale data migrations. For data migrations, you can shut down your Snowball device when you are finished and return it to AWS, which will take care of moving the data to Amazon S3.

• AWS Snowmobile: This is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to transfer up to 100PB of data to AWS. To use Snowmobile, you connect a removable, high-speed network switch from Snowmobile to your local network and then you can begin a high-speed data transfer from a variety of different data sources. After your data is loaded, the Snowmobile device is shipped back to AWS where the data is imported into Amazon S3.

AWS Snow Family remote management is available in all commercial regions where Snowball Edge devices are available except AWS China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet, AWS China (Ningxia) operated by NWCD, Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Osaka), and Europe (Milan). To get more details, check out the AWS Snowball product page or the AWS Snowball documentation.