AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
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A company has 5 PB of archived data on physical tapes. The company needs to preserve the data on the tapes for another 10 years for compliance purposes. The company wants to migrate to AWS in the next 6 months. The data center that stores the tapes has a 1 Gbps uplink internet connectivity.
Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?
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Community
UAnonymous
A
Read the data from the tapes on premises. Stage the data in a local NFS storage. Use AWS DataSync to migrate the data to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval.
B
Use an on-premises backup application to read the data from the tapes and to write directly to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
C
Order multiple AWS Snowball devices that have Tape Gateway. Copy the physical tapes to virtual tapes in Snowball. Ship the Snowball devices to AWS. Create a lifecycle policy to move the tapes to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
D
Configure an on-premises Tape Gateway. Create virtual tapes in the AWS Cloud. Use backup software to copy the physical tape to the virtual tape.
Explanation:
Explanation
Option C is the most cost-effective solution for the following reasons:
-
Data Volume: 5 PB (5,000 TB) is an enormous amount of data. Transferring this over a 1 Gbps internet connection would take approximately:
- 5 PB = 5,000 TB = 5,000,000 GB
- 1 Gbps = ~125 MB/s (megabytes per second) = ~0.125 GB/s
- Time = 5,000,000 GB / 0.125 GB/s = 40,000,000 seconds ≈ 463 days
This exceeds the 6-month timeline and would incur significant network transfer costs.
-
AWS Snowball with Tape Gateway:
- Snowball is designed for petabyte-scale data transfer when network bandwidth is insufficient
- Tape Gateway allows physical tapes to be copied to virtual tapes on the Snowball device
- Shipping physical devices is much faster and more cost-effective for this volume
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the most cost-effective storage class for data that needs to be preserved for 10+ years with infrequent retrieval
-
Why other options are less optimal:
- Option A: DataSync over 1 Gbps would take too long (463+ days) and incur high network transfer costs
- Option B: Direct writing to Glacier Deep Archive over internet would also take too long and may not be supported by all backup applications
- Option D: Tape Gateway over internet would face the same bandwidth limitations and take too long
-
Cost considerations:
- Snowball service costs are fixed per device
- Glacier Deep Archive has the lowest storage costs (
$0.00099 per GB-month) - No egress costs for compliance data that won't be retrieved
- Shipping costs are minimal compared to network transfer costs for 5 PB
Key AWS Services:
- AWS Snowball: Physical data transfer device for large-scale data migration
- AWS Storage Gateway - Tape Gateway: Virtual tape library interface
- Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive: Lowest-cost storage for long-term archival (10+ years)
- Lifecycle policies: Automate transition to appropriate storage classes
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