AWS Snowball Edge
An extremely durable, portable piece of hardware from Amazon, the AWS Snowball Edge is capable of petabyte-scale data transport with on-board storage and dense compute capabilities. It was engineered to perform in the world’s most extreme environments, including warzones at the tactical edge, in a secure and transportable fashion. Currently in use on US Navy ships, aircraft, and by the military’s deployed units in special operations around the world. (source: Amazon website).
Weighing in at under 50 pounds, it can be checked as a standard piece of airplane luggage. Warfighters collect large amounts of mission-critical data while in the field, and with the Snowball Edge, they are able to quickly and securely copy, transfer, store, and access their data at the tactical edge, despite physically extreme environments.
The Snowball Edge has passed the military’s requirements for an airdrop test, which required the device to be dropped from 28 feet, 80 times, on all four corners and on all six sides. The Snowball Edge has also passed the Department of Defense’s (DoD) 901 Barge Explosive Test, during which 83 pounds of plastic explosive are detonated 20 feet from the device, multiple times.
And, the Snowball Edge is designed to work in sustained, extreme environments with temperatures ranging from 140 degrees Fahrenheit to -20 degrees Fahrenheit. This capability was critical for the Hawaii United States Geological Survey (Hawaii USGS) in 2018 when volcano lava was rapidly approaching their building. In order to save their data, Hawaii USGS shipped Snowball Edges to transfer and safely store their data while their physical location faced natural disaster.