Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Druva partnered to offer Druva Cloud Platform on AWS Snowball Edge, the cloud giant’s data transfer and compute device.

AWS launched Snowball in 2015. It’s a physical box that allows AWS users to ship huge amounts of data from their data centers for import into AWS’ public cloud.

A year later it rolled out Snowball Edge, a 100-terabytes data transfer device that, unlike the earlier storage-only Snowball, includes on-board compute. This make it ideal for storage and compute in edge locations — and makes it easier to migrate massive amounts of data between the edge and the cloud.

Making Druva Cloud Platform, the software-defined storage company’s data management platform, available on Snowball Edge will make it easier for companies with remote offices and bandwidth-constrained locations to securely ship terabytes of data to the cloud, said Prem Ananthakrishnan, VP of product management at Druva.

“This joint solution allows our mutual customers to accelerate their cloud journey,” he said. “The key challenge these customers have is the ability to import and export large volumes of data to the cloud.”

The product is unique, he added, in that no other data management vendor has a partnership and integration with AWS Snowball Edge.

In addition to cloud migration, other use cases involve mergers and acquisitions; data seeding, which is the initial seeding of a database with data; and companies expanding to new, and often remote, sites.

“A lot of our customers go through active M&A,” Ananthakrishnan said. “For them, the ability to ingest the data from the company they are acquiring is pretty important, especially from a legal and risk-exposure standpoint.”

With Druva on AWS Snowball Edge users apply backup policies and backup or restore directly to and from the device. Druva’s global deduplication technology means only a single copy of data is stored, which ensures maximum storage on device.

Once data has been migrated to the cloud and if an organization decides to move to the direct-to-cloud model, customers can unplug the device and ship it back with no interruption to their data protection service.

Druva also offers this “as a service” and at no additional cost. Customers can buy AWS Snowball Edge within the Druva Cloud Platform through the Phoenix Data Protection Service (Phoenix is Druva’s cloud-based backup and archival product aimed at remote office servers). The new Snowball Edge service is bundled in Druva's Enterprise and Elite packages at no extra charge to customers.

The service is currently available via early access to Druva and AWS customers in North America. It will be globally available in early 2019.

The partners plan to make additional services — like AWS Greengrass — available in the future. Greengrass is AWS’ software that extends the cloud provider’s capabilities to local devices, including IoT devices.

“We see this as being a phase one of multiple waves,” Ananthakrishnan said. “What’s unique about Snowball Edge versus the basic flavor [Snowball] is that is also runs Greengrass. Over time we expect to leverage some of these things as well. We expect to strategically partner with AWS to evolve this further.”