Data migration is a key challenge in any cloud migration and as a storage admin it always fascinated me to understand efforts it take to migrate petabytes of data to the public cloud.In this post I will try to give a brief outline of  3 out of 8 ways in which we can migrate data to Amazon web services.

AWS Direct Connect:-In AWS direct connect we will be having a dedicated network connection from your  data center premises to AWS. With the high available speeds you can either directly copy data from any of your server  to an S3 bucket using cli commands or do host based migration to any ec2 instance with sufficient number of EBS volumes.
Multiple connections can be used simultaneously for increased bandwidth or redundancy.We can also use the AWS  partner network in case AWS direct connect location is not available near to your data centers.

AWS Import/Export Snowball:- AWS import export snowball is petabyte scale storage migration solution. AWS will ship you a storage device as shown below to you data center,  which can copy 50 or 80 TB of storage.

once you receive a Snowball, you plug it in, connect it to your network, configure the IP address , and install the AWS Snowball client. Use the client to identify the directories you want to copy. Data will be encrypted while copying to snowball  and decrypted when AWS offloads it to S3. As per AWS it takes 21 hours to copy 80TB of data from your data source to a Snowball  by using a 10 Gbps at 80 percent network utilization. AWS has also shown use case where customer was able to migrate 1PB of data in 1 week time using multiple snowballs parallel.

AWS storage gateway:- Storage gateway is installed on a local host in your data center. It creates an on-premises virtual appliance that provides seamless and secure integration between your on-premises applications and AWS’s storage infrastructure.It can create iSCSI volumes for storing all or recently accessed data on premise for faster response while asynchronously  uploading this data to Amazon S3 in background.

A combination of AWS snow ball with either direct  connect or storage gateway will help in making migration much faster and easier.We can do a one time migration of data using snow ball and later make differential data update using direct connect or storage gateway.Hope this has given some basic idea on migrations with AWS solutions. Thanks for reading.

You can also read my blog post on a NextGen SSD Interface-NVMe .click on below link. Happy reading. 🙂

https://sskanth.com/2016/04/20/nvme-nextgen-sd-interface/