Unveiled at the 2016 re:Invent event, theAWS Snowmobile Data Transport Service, which has now been cancelled by AWS.
The Snowmobile data transport service mainly uses large trucks to carry a large number of Snowball servers, thereby speeding up the relocation of large amounts of data to other locations while also ensuring the accuracy of the data during movement.
AWS has confirmed the cancellation of this service. In a subsequent statement, AWS stated that it has launched a more cost-effective data migration service internally. The AWS Snowmobile data transportation service also involves vehicle driving and parking, as well as operational power, cooling, network connectivity and security issues. Therefore, the AWS Snowmobile data transportation service will be replaced by other services.
When AWS announced the launch of the AWS Snowmobile data transport service in 2016, AWS stated that using a 10GB/s network bandwidth, it would take at least 1 years to transfer 100EB (approximately 26 million TB) of data. However, if the AWS Snowmobile data transport service, which can carry up to 100PB of data per truck, were used for "transfer," all the data could be moved in just six months using 10 large trucks.
However, Amazon has recently begun to streamline costs. The costs behind the AWS Snowmobile data transportation service, coupled with market willingness to use it, have obviously become one of the reasons for the removal of this service.
In addition, compared to the AWS Snowmobile data transportation service that requires large trucks, more companies now clearly prefer to use Snowball Edge devices to move relatively smaller amounts of data, and can build flexible data migration based on the service.
