CSAA – Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

[rajrenu1984]

Question: You are working for a large telecommunications company. They have a requirement to move 83 TB data warehouse to the cloud. It would take 2 months to transfer the data given their current bandwidth allocation.

Which is the most cost-effective service that would allow you to quickly upload their data into AWS?

a. Amazon Snowball Edge

b. Amazon Snowball

c. Amazon Direct Connect

d. Amazon S3 MultiPart Upload

Answer explanation says:

Remember that an 80 TB Snowball appliance and 100 TB Snowball Edge appliance only have 72 TB and 83 TB of usable capacity respectively. Hence, it would be costly if you use two Snowball devices compared to using just one AWS Snowball Edge device.

But AWS documentation @ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/specifications.html#specs-storage-optimized says that “Snowball Edge devices have up to 80 TB of usable space.”

Can you please let us know if this is something I am referencing or reading incorrectly or if the answer in the exam is wrong ?

Thanks

Raj

• This discussion was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by  rajrenu1984.

[Tutorials-Dojo]

Hi Raj,

Thank you for bringing this up to our attention. It seems that there is a discrepancy in the official AWS documentation. The following AWS references show that the usable capacity is 83 TB:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/ug/device-differences.html

https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/snowball/latest/ug/AWSSnowball-ug.pdf

The following shows that the usable capacity is only 80 TB. It is possible that AWS has recently made a change:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/specifications.html#specs-storage-optimized

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/

I have raised a pull-request to the official AWS documentation for this issue. Let’s just wait for what they have to say:

https://github.com/awsdocs/aws-snowball-user-guide/pull/2