AWS scoops Intel silicon and 8TB of storage into new Snowcone edge box AWS has added a new and very small member to its Snow family of temporarily-on-premises devices. Snow devices are rented for a set number of days, because the expectation is they’ll be used to gather data or run some jobs somewhere you don’t always need an appliance. AWS offers a datacentre-on-a-truck Snowmobile for jobs like …
. . that an 8TB disk still has more bandwidth than an average Internet connection.
I'm guessing that a 1GBps fiber line would work better, but that is far from being the general case in the USA, so fill up a snowcone and ship the box back so AWS can transfer it to your instance is what this is about.
Not a bad idea.
I’ve held one of these in my hands. One use-case is a video shooter taking it out in hostile conditions. Dunno if it’ll be popular, but it’s a super-cool piece of gear.
So at least one part of this is for those cases where, some a time, there is no expectation on connectivity.
There's no way that well-sealed box could comfortably dissipate the full 100W that USB3 could deliver to it, so I suspect the CPU is more pedestrian. The Atom® x5-E3930 would fill the bill rather nicely: two cores, 8GB RAM max, (just) enough PCIe for those two Ethernet ports, a couple of SATA interfaces for two 4TB SSDs. And capable of a bit of undemanding virtualization. Dead cheap, and with an industrial operating temperature range, too.
That Atom has 6 X PCIe 2.0 lanes available - 3GB/s to spread between all that IO would struggle with storage/network I/O. Realistically, PCI 3.0 is required to support 10Gbps NICs plus SSD support without bottlenecks.
While I think you are right about heat dissipation, low core count Xeons like the D-1602 allow you 32x PCIe 3.0 and low power usage if you keep them throttled back.
If this is dual CPU then this would have to be dual-capable CPUs and so Xeons rather than i7s.
D1602 is single-socket only also, so unless there are 2 independent blades/motherboards in here instead it must be something else.
Of course Intel could have baked them a special unit that is 2S.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
