Amazon Leaves Snowcone Data Migration Boxes And Older Snowball Edge Kit Out To Melt

Amazon Web Services is pulling the plug on its Snowcone data migration devices and will sunset all but the latest crop of its Snowball edge appliances.

If you're not familiar, Snowcone was essentially a small, ruggedized network attached storage (NAS) device measuring 9x6x3 inches in size. It was shipped to customers who could not easily migrate large quantities of data to the cloud.

Once loaded with data, customers would ship the device back to Amazon, where its contents would be loaded into an S3 bucket of their choosing.

The devices were officially discontinued on Tuesday, and Snowcone documentation and data sheets seem to have disappeared from AWS's site. A Wayback Machine record shows it could be had in 8TB hard disk or 14TB SSD versions depending on your needs.

If you still have a Snowcone device and were in the process of loading data onto it for migration, don't fret. In a statement on Tuesday, Amazon promised it'll continue to support existing customers until this time next year. However, the cloudy concern is encouraging customers to complete their jobs and return the devices before they become paperweights.

Snowcones aren't the only products getting axed. Effective Tuesday, Amazon revealed it is discontinuing three of its prior generation Snowball devices. These are essentially ruggedized suitcase servers that could be used for a variety of storage, migration, and edge compute duties.

Specifically, AWS is killing off the Snowball Edge Storage Optimized 80GB, Edge Compute Optimized with 52 vCPUs, and Compute Optimized with GPU devices.

Again, users with soon-to-be-deprecated devices don’t need to panic as AWS will wait a year before it requires the boxes to be returned – or they stop working.

Unlike Snowcone, though, the Snowball storage and compute offerings aren't going away entirely just yet – Amazon will continue to offer and support the latest generation of those devices. The storage optimized variant can be had with 210TB of NVMe storage (a 100TB pricing tier is also offered) while the compute optimized variant boasts 104 vCPU cores.

Unfortunately, it seems those looking for a GPU-equipped Snowball system are officially out of luck.

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The announcement comes just over six months after Amazon announced it was abandoning its fleet of Snowmobile data haulers, trucks packed full of kit which once shuttled petabytes of spinning disks from to cloud to enterprise datacenter and back.

Amazon's reason for allowing its data-movers to melt is simple: most of its customers don’t want to use them. "Our customers strongly prefer online migrations to offline," the cloud giant’s post states.

So naturally, AWS recommends using services like DataSync or AWS Direct Connect to migrate your data over the net. And if that's still not practical, there is still one Snowball Edge Storage appliance knocking around. Meanwhile, for those that need edge compute, it suggests opting for its more conventional 1U and 2U on-prem Outpost systems as opposed to Snowball's quirky suitcase form factor. ®