Last week Komprise VP of Marketing Darren Cunningham spent some time with Ramesh Kumar, the Head of Product and Solutions for AWS Snow Family of services at Amazon Web Services. The discussion focused on our newest integration to help customers migrate data to AWS using AWS Snowball.
Ramesh kicked off the discussion with an introduction to the AWS Snow Family, its genesis and how it uniquely solves for customer data migration use cases. Darren reviewed the Komprise analytics-centric approach to what we call Smart Data Migration and introduced our Intelligent Data Management platform. The rest of the time was spent diving into use cases that are a good fit for Komprise and AWS Snowball. You can watch the full discussion here.
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What capabilities does Komprise bring to AWS Snowball?
Ramesh: The key benefit is simplifying the migration process for customers. The primary use case where Komprise is a good fit for AWS customers is large multi-petabyte migrations with AWS Snowball, especially as these migrations require customers to use multiple Snowball devices to complete their data migration project. Customers can use Snow Large Data Migration Manager to plan their large data migration project and Komprise to manage the migration at their on-premises location.
How does Komprise for Snowball work?
Ramesh: Each Snowball Edge device can manage up to 80TB of storage, so customers segment their data to be copied to multiple Snow devices. These customers can use Komprise to automate and simplify their migration project using multiple Snowball devices.
Komprise manages how much data is written to each Snowball, provides user feedback when any Snowball approaches capacity and when the capacity has been reached. Komprise also prompts the user to detach the full Snowballs and send them to AWS and attach the next Snowball device to Komprise, whereupon Komprise will continue the data copying operations automatically.
With Komprise and Snowball, customers have an automated, efficient solution to move many petabytes of data offline into AWS. You don’t omit or duplicate; the Komprise software will manage the migration, tracking the data that was sent on each device, which reduces complexity for the customer. Enterprise customers require integrity and auditability. Komprise provides these customers with a detailed audit log showing where the data has moved.
What are the primary benefits of Komprise and an AWS Snow solution?
Ramesh:
- Firstly, if you need your file metadata preserved during migrations, Komprise and the Snowball solution provide the capability to migrate SMB and NFS data sets with corresponding metadata.
- Secondly, large migrations require using multiple devices in parallel. Komprise offers auto parallelization to accelerate migrations.
- Thirdly, you can plan, execute, and monitor your large migrations using the Snow Large Data Migration Manager. Komprise fits in nicely and helps simplify the execution.
How do you summarize the better together message to AWS customers?
Ramesh: Komprise makes migrations requiring multiple Snowball Edge devices easy and relatively seamless. What I mean by this is that Komprise keeps track of the data so you don’t have to. Once you have planned your large data migration project using Snow Large Data Migration Manager, you can use Komprise to start the migration and it will run in the background before connecting the next device. This means no more managing which data was transferred to each device, comparing checksum data, etc. Customers can move faster and focus on their day-to-day activities to run the business while reducing the friction that has delayed many of our customers from taking action.
What’s the bottom line for Komprise and AWS customers?
Ramesh: Komprise makes Snowball migrations easy and with visibility for migrations and it builds confidence: understanding the data you are moving and the progress of the migration. Komprise manages multiple Snowball devices through the entire process and streamlines this process.
For a detailed discussion about the Komprise offering for AWS Snow Family solutions, read this white paper.
Learn more about how Komprise works with all AWS storage solutions.
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