Day 18 - AWS Snow Family & Hybrid Storage

Date: 2025-10-01 (Wednesday)
Status: “Done”

Lecture Notes

AWS Snow Family

Purpose-built devices and services to move large datasets into and out of AWS when networks are limited or data volumes are massive.

  • AWS Snowcone: Small, rugged device (~8 TB). Suited for edge and remote sites.
  • AWS Snowball:
    • Snowball Edge Storage Optimized: Up to ~80 TB usable storage.
    • Snowball Edge Compute Optimized: Adds powerful compute with ~42 TB storage.
  • AWS Snowmobile: Exabyte-scale data transfer (up to 100 PB) in a secure containerized data center.

Snow Family Comparison:

Device Storage Compute Use Case
Snowcone 8 TB 2 vCPUs Edge, IoT
Snowball Storage 80 TB 40 vCPUs Data migration
Snowball Compute 42 TB 52 vCPUs Edge computing
Snowmobile 100 PB N/A Datacenter migration

When to Use Snow Family:

  • Limited or expensive bandwidth
  • Large data volumes (TB to PB)
  • Remote or disconnected locations
  • Edge computing requirements
  • Regulatory data residency

AWS Storage Gateway

Hybrid cloud storage service that connects on-premises applications with cloud-backed storage.

Gateway Types

File Gateway

  • NFS/SMB file shares backed by S3 objects.
  • Use cases: user shares, application backups, archives.

Volume Gateway

  • iSCSI block storage backed by S3 with EBS snapshots.
  • Modes:
    • Cached volumes: Primary data in S3; local cache on-prem.
    • Stored volumes: Primary data on-prem; async copy to S3.
  • Use cases: on-prem block workloads with cloud backup/DR.

Tape Gateway

  • Virtual Tape Library (VTL) for existing backup apps (e.g., NetBackup, Veeam).
  • Writes appear as tape but land in S3/Glacier.
  • Use cases: tape replacement and archival modernization.

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Hands-On Labs

Lab 24 – AWS Storage Gateway (On-Premises Integration)

  1. Create Storage Gateway → 24-2.1
  2. Create File Shares → 24-2.2
  3. Mount File Shares On-Prem → 24-2.3
  4. Clean Up Resources → 24-3

Lab 14 – AWS VM Import/Export (Part 1)

  1. VMware Workstation → 14-01
  2. Export Virtual Machine from On-Premises → 14-02.1
  3. Upload Virtual Machine to AWS → 14-02.2