Question #1234
A company has 600 TB of archival data stored on-premises in a Network Attached Storage (NAS). This data must be retained for 10 years for compliance purposes and is accessed only for rare audits. The company wants to migrate this data to AWS within 30 days. They have 450 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth on their public internet connection available for data transfer. What should a solutions architect recommend to migrate and store the data at the LOWEST cost?
Order AWS Snowball devices to transfer the data. Use a lifecycle policy to transition the files to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
Deploy a Site-to-Site VPN connection between the on-premises network and AWS. Use the AWS CLI to copy the data directly to Amazon S3 Glacier.
Provision a 450 Mbps AWS Direct Connect connection and transfer the data to Amazon S3. Use a lifecycle policy to transition the files to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
Use AWS DataSync to transfer the data by deploying a DataSync agent on-premises. Configure the DataSync task to copy files directly from the NAS to Amazon S3 Glacier.
Explanation
The correct answer is A. Here's why:
1. Bandwidth & Time Constraints: Transferring 600 TB over 450 Mbps would take ~123 days (exceeding the 30-day requirement). Snowball avoids this bottleneck by shipping physical devices.
2. Cost-Effective Transfer: Snowball is designed for large-scale data migrations, reducing network costs and time.
3. Storage Cost: S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the cheapest AWS storage for long-term archival, accessible via lifecycle policies after initial upload to S3.
Why Other Options Fail:
- B/C: Direct internet/VPN transfers exceed the time limit.
- C: Direct Connect adds cost without solving bandwidth limitations.
- D: DataSync cannot copy directly to Glacier; lifecycle policies are required, and transfer time remains prohibitive.
Key Points:
- Use Snowball for large data transfers with tight deadlines.
- Transition to S3 Glacier Deep Archive via lifecycle policies for compliance and cost savings.
Answer
The correct answer is: A