Seattle Cloud
Challenge
Seattle Cloud needed to quickly transfer about nine million files totaling 4 TB of disk space from a failing hard drive without disrupting business operations. Due to the amount of data being transferred, we calculated average bandwidth throughput across a public channel and estimated that it may take more than a week to copy the files. Viewing that as a roadblock to keeping the service online, an alternative solution was needed.
Solution & Designs
The Oak Rocket team provisioned a SnowBall service from AWS to address the problem. The Snowball was overnighted by courier to the data center and connected to the local disk array. Once the transfer was complete the Snowball was returned to AWS where engineers connected the drive locally and transferred all media to an S3 bucket.
For each environment an EC2 instance, with attached EBS volumes was used to store application configurations and project code so they could be downloaded from the customer repository. MSSQL RDS is the application database backend and both EC2 and RDS are monitored by CloudWatch metrics and alerts with IAM as access management service.
AWS Services Used
- EC2 instances with EBS volumes attached.
- MSSQL RDS
- SnowBall
- S3
- IAM
- CloudWatch: RDS, EC2 metrics monitoring and alerts.
- AWS Backup to managed backup for all EBS volumes.
- Route 53
Business Benefits
Oak Rocket was able to lower the migration time down from weeks to days. This solution saved time, dramatically reduced data transfer costs, while lowering risk.
The Snowball solution from AWS for situations like these is the most practical and efficient way to transfer large amounts of data. In this case, it allowed us to take the migration time from two weeks to two days.