Snowball Edge is a hardware released by Amazon Web Services that incorporates both computing and storage power to help customers run tasks and store data locally. This product was announced at AWS’ annual event called re:Invent that took place in Las Vegas last week.

Snowball Edge is an extension of its product called Snowball – a data transport product that helps to transfer large amounts of data to and from the AWS cloud. This product can store up to a petabyte of data, and is most helpful to transfer data through a secure connection. Currently, challenges faced in the transfer of data is the high network costs and security, so Snowball was created to address both these challenges. When you sign up for an AWS job, the Snowball device will be automatically shipped to you. Once it arrives, simply attach it to your network, and run the client to establish a secure connection. Then, you’re all set to download large amounts of data at almost one-fifth of the cost.

Now that you know about Snowball is, it’ll be easy to understand what its extension would do. This new extension expands the scope of Snowball with increased connectivity and higher storage. Also, Snowball Edge enhances horizontal scalability through clustering, and also provides new storage endpoints to connect S3 and NFS clients. It’s Lambda-powered local processing makes it a handy tool for heavy computational tasks. This product can now store about 100 TB of data, an upgrade from Snowball’s maximum capacity of 80 TB.

In addition, Snowball Edge comes with a unique design that can take any amount of wear and tear at home. Also, it can now be used in industrial, agricultural, and military environments, thereby increasing the scope of its usage. Such a hardy design also helps with rack mounting, especially when you want to make use of the clustering feature of this product.

In terms of connectivity, Edge offers many options. Data can be transferred to Edge through Cellular data or Wi-Fi from any IoT-enabled device. Also, there’s a PCIe expansion port for additional data transfer. You can also use it with a wide range of network options such as 10GBase-T, 10 or 25 GB SFB28, and 40 GB QSFB+. With such advanced option, you can transfer about 100 TB of data within just 19 hours! In other devices, the entire process can even take a week.

Further, you can use clustering to gain the benefits of horizontal scaling. For example, you can configure two or more Edge appliances into a cluster, so the entire setup can have greater durability and higher capacity. Such an option is sure to make it more convenient for you to store and handle large amounts of data.  Also, you can remove devices when you want to shrink the storage and computational power of your system. This scalability and flexibility is truly where Snowball Edge scores over other devices.

In all, yet another innovation product from AWS that is sure to bring computation and cloud storage a lot closer to people.

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