Meet the first AWS Snowball customer in Australia

Australian magazine giant Bauer Media has been revealed as the first customer of Amazon Web Services’ physical data migration device, Snowball.

The 80TB device can be rented or bought outright that physically migrates data from on-premises hardware to AWS’s public cloud.

The migration is being undertaken by Sydney-based Strut Digital, which already had a services deal to manage Bauer’s AWS environment. Speaking to CRN at the AWS Summit in Sydney, Strut chief executive Zack Levy said that Bauer typically generates 1-3 terabytes of data a day, and the migration into AWS S3 storage is ongoing.

Levy said he ordered a Snowball as soon as it was available locally.

“Snowball is a very straight copy-paste-type service; it’s exciting how simple that is. This is just a case of lifting 50TB and it is in S3 the next day,” said Levy.

He added that that while Snowball is very new to Australia, the product has already started inspiring new services for providers.

“We’re starting to think about how we can integrate that into our offering. It’s a very simple solution but it solves a resource-intensive problem. The concept that appeals to our customers is that it takes the distraction away so they can add value to their customers.

“Once you know you’ve got that tool at your disposal, it changes the way you think about long-term archiving storage," said Levy.

Yesterday at the AWS Summit in Sydney, the cloud giant announced local availability for the 80TB model of Snowball. AWS chief security information officer Stephen Schmidt also revealed Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, a service that attempts to speed up data uploads using a 50-location network that was previously reserved for the Amazon CloudFront content delivery service.

Bauer Media has undergone a number of IT transformative efforts in recent years as its business shifts towards a digital model. The company’s titles include Australian Women’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Australian House and Garden and Wheels.

In December, Bauer extended its managed services deal with Sydney provider Enablis to include upkeep of its data network, security, telephony, LAN and wi-fi.

Based in St Leonards in Sydney, Strut provides cloud migration, managed services, cloud strategy, application development and DevOps services. Its customers include Westpac, Qantas, St George Bank and Domain.