Just think of all the “snow” products as a modern version of sneaker net (it used to be faster to run down the hall with a disk than transfer files over the network because networks used to be really slow).
The snow products solve the same issues. Despite fiber connections and such it just doesn’t make sense to transfer massive volumes of data over the network. It’s often literally faster and cheaper to ship a box of hard drives via UPS or FedEx.
Snowball was for big sets of files and is the size of a suitcase. Snowmobile is for petabyte scale and is literally a tractor trailer full of disks.
The use case here seems to be more towards remote situations with smaller data. You have something that collects a lot of data and need to get that into your cloud. Instead of running around with a bunch if portable hard drives and then having someone transfer the data manually to S3 over the internet you just dump your data into the snowcone and hand it to your local UPS guy and let AWS take care of the rest. Lots of remote data collection devices and such would fit into that model.
Clearly the use case is rather specific but for people in the business of collecting data on stuff and then needing to get it into the cloud this is actually a nifty little device.
The snow products solve the same issues. Despite fiber connections and such it just doesn’t make sense to transfer massive volumes of data over the network. It’s often literally faster and cheaper to ship a box of hard drives via UPS or FedEx.
Snowball was for big sets of files and is the size of a suitcase. Snowmobile is for petabyte scale and is literally a tractor trailer full of disks.
The use case here seems to be more towards remote situations with smaller data. You have something that collects a lot of data and need to get that into your cloud. Instead of running around with a bunch if portable hard drives and then having someone transfer the data manually to S3 over the internet you just dump your data into the snowcone and hand it to your local UPS guy and let AWS take care of the rest. Lots of remote data collection devices and such would fit into that model.
Clearly the use case is rather specific but for people in the business of collecting data on stuff and then needing to get it into the cloud this is actually a nifty little device.