To become more agile in the Big Data world of digital business, many companies are looking toward the cloud. However, the pesky laws of physics work against moving the massive amounts of data that might live in old servers and storage centers. To solve this problem, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has introduced its Snowball data transfer device.

For a closer look at this new technology, Stu Miniman of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, invited Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, GM of Amazon S3 at AWS, to talk about the Snowball during the Amazon re:Invent 2015 conference.

Moving day for data

The Snowball is a compact physical device about the size of a backpack. It can hold a massive amount of data and works by plugging directly into a data source. It also features gigabit networking to help coordinate data drops with multiple units. Once the data is copied from the source, the Snowball can be locked up for shipping back to Amazon, where it uploads the data to a Cloud service.

The system rents on a per-job basis, limited by a time window. The customer does not need to actually buy the Snowball units. To protect the information inside, the device resists tampering with internal hardware, encrypts all data and physically locks.

Easy to buy, easy to use

Bukovec pointed out that a key part of Amazon’s philosophy was making things easy for customers to use. This idea shaped its data storage concept of moving data by policy and automation. With AWS, the customer gets the benefits of a whole platform at once, including metrics, security and monitoring. The goal is to make it easy for the customer to interact with storage.

The idea, she said, has become central to how Amazon builds.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Amazon re:Invent 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE