Commvault Adds Support for AWS Snowball Appliance

Digital Integration: Overcoming Enterprise Data Challenges

One of the more challenging tactical issues associated with making the move to the public cloud is the physical act of moving terabytes of data. It can take weeks to move that amount of data across a wide area network. For that reason, most IT organizations wind up buying hard drives that they then load up with data and ship to the cloud service provider.

To help streamline that process, Amazon Web Services came up with Snowball, a dedicated appliance that it ships to customers pre-loaded with encryption software. Customers then ship that appliance back to AWS to load their data without requiring them to acquire their own hard drives. Today at the AWS Summit conference in Chicago, Commvault became one of the first providers of data protection software to add support for Snowball.

Robbie Wright, principal product marketing manager for service provider solutions at Commvault, says Commvault customers can now use the company’s software to load data onto the Snowball appliance. Once that appliance is shipped to AWS, the data being loaded can then be managed via Commvault data protection software just as if it was residing locally, says Wright.

Over time, it’s more than likely that other cloud service providers will develop their own secure appliances for securely shipping data that is later ingested by the cloud service provider. Commvault envisions adding support as those appliances become available, Wright says.

In the meantime, Wright says, IT organizations would do well to think of AWS as being a lot more than just another tier of storage. At this juncture, it’s clear that lots of primary and secondary data is being transferred into the AWS cloud. The challenge IT organizations now face is finding a way to manage all that data regardless of where it happens to be residing at any given moment.