DigitalGlobe Moving Earth Imagery Data Via AWS Snowmobile

Earth is moving to the cloud! DigitalGlobe has announced plans to move its earth imagery data to the cloud, and has opted to use AWS Snowmobile to accomplish this momentous task.

This Amazon Web Services offering is an exabyte-scale service designed to migrate up to 100 petabytes of data into the cloud.

Amazon Snowmobile will facilitate the transfer of large amounts of Earth satellite imagery and related data through a 45-foot-long shipping container that can be hauled by a semi-trailer truck, as DigitalGlobe company noted in a blog post detailing the process.

The company raveled that it had converted and encrypted 54 million Earth imagery files as well as other ancillary data through AWS Snowmobile in the first quarter of 2017 — designated to be the load-in process for cloud migration.

It then turned over the Snowmobile container to AWS to facilitate for the validation and transfer of large data workloads to the AWS Simple Storage Service cloud platform.

It now moves up to 100 terabytes of satellite imagery to AWS S3 on a daily basis, as the company moves towards the goal of closing its commercial data centers, and rely entirely on the Amazon cloud platform for its data needs.