Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance - FAQs

1. What is a Wasabi Ball appliance?

Wasabi Ball is a data transfer appliance that can be used to migrate your data to Wasabi cloud. The Wasabi Ball appliance is great to expedite the data transfer to avoid delays due to high-cost network dependency and security concerns while transferring large data sets over public internet.

 

2: Why would I need to use Wasabi Ball?

• Urgent cloud migration plan: A time-sensitive strategy for moving data, applications, and services from a traditional on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based environment. This type of plan is typically necessary when organizations need to meet a tight deadline, such as when transitioning to a new cloud provider or complying with changing regulations.

• Regulatory compliance examination: An assessment of an organization's processes, systems, and data to ensure they meet the requirements of relevant laws and regulations. This can include privacy laws, industry-specific regulations, and security standards.

• Security directives from the Chief Security Officer: A set of guidelines, policies, and procedures established by the highest-ranking security executive within an organization. These directives help to ensure that the organization's security posture aligns with its risk management strategy and legal obligations.

• High-bandwidth utilization: A condition in which a network or system is utilizing a large amount of its available bandwidth, resulting in decreased performance and potential bottlenecks. This can occur due to increased traffic, video streaming, and data transfers, among other things. High-bandwidth utilization can impact an organization's ability to operate efficiently and may require upgrades to its network infrastructure to resolve.


Wasabi Ball can help quickly move the data from on-premises to the Wasabi cloud and allow you to stay compliant with the back-up strategy. The quick transfer of data to the cloud for back-up aligns with the CSO’s security strategy to safeguard against a ransomware attack. Since the data transfer to the Wasabi Ball is local, it doesn’t impact the network bandwidth thereby avoiding any network congestion issues.

 

3: What makes Wasabi Ball an advantageous option for data transfer?

A Wasabi Ball offers secure and efficient transfer of vast amounts of data to Wasabi. It is a practical solution if you don't want to incur expenses on network upgrades, if you frequently have data build-ups, if you're situated in a remote area, or if high-speed internet is not feasible or costly.

 

5: How does Wasabi Ball work?

• Customers can contact their Wasabi account managers and request for a Wasabi Ball.
• Wasabi account manager will provide a questionnaire to help understand the use case.
• Upon receiving the filled questionnaire from the customer, a Wasabi Bal appliance will be shipped to the address provided in the questionnaire.
• The customer can connect the Wasabi Ball to their storage via, NFS, SMB or S3 to start the local transfer.
• Once the data is transferred to the Wasabi Ball, the customer can ship the appliance to Wasabi.
• Wasabi will ingest the data to the desired buckets in the desired Wasabi Ball supported region and provide a confirmation to the customer.
• Once the customer confirms data in their account and the correct bucket/region, Wasabi provides a proof of data deletion from the Wasabi Ball.

 

6: How much data can I transfer using Wasabi Ball?

You can transfer up to 250 TB data with a new Wasabi Ball device. Older devices can transfer up to 100 TB per device.

 

7: Which regions are supported for transferring data using Wasabi Ball?

Wasabi Ball is currently supported to ingest data in North America and European Union regions. Wasabi plans to extend the support to other Wasabi regions shortly.

Additionally, you can use Wasabi replication/migration services to move data to any other Wasabi regions.

 

8: How long will it take to move data using a Wasabi Ball?

As a general guideline, the process takes roughly two weeks in total, accounting for both shipping and data transfer time. The speed of data transfer can vary, depending on various factors such as the speed of the local network, the size of the files, and the read speed of data from your local servers.

 

9. Am I able to track the ball after I ship it?

Yes, the shipping labels will have tracking information on it, which can be used to track the Wasabi Ball while in transit. That info will be shared with you once we ship the Wasabi ball out to you.

 

10. How will I get notified when the ball arrives at the Wasabi data center?

A Wasabi Sales Engineer will contact you via the support ticket to notify you that we have received the ball.

 

11. Who has access to my data after I ship the ball back?

While the Wasabi Ball is in transit, the customer's data is secure as the hardware is physically secured in an outer casing, the device is secured with an admin username/password for login and once we receive the ball at the Wasabi data center, the data is automatically stored in Wasabi vaults through remote commands, rendering it inaccessible to anyone. 

 

12. When will I get notified about my data being transferred to Wasabi account?

A Wasabi Sales Engineer will contact you via the support ticket to notify you once the data has been uploaded to Wasabi in your desired bucket(s). 

 

13. Am I able to verify whether all my data has been transferred to my Wasabi account from the ball?

Yes, the customer is able to verify if the data is transferred to their Wasabi account using the Wasabi console. A Wasabi Sales Engineer will work with you to verify that.

 

14. Does Wasabi wipe my data from the ball after it is transferred to the Wasabi cloud?

Yes, once the customer confirms that the data transferred via the Wasabi Ball is available for their access in their desired bucket/region, Wasabi will wipe the Wasabi Ball appliance clean, reset to factory settings and provide a confirmation via the support ticket.

 

15. Can I order more than one Wasabi Ball at a time?

Yes, you can order multiple Wasabi Balls if you are transferring large data set (>100 TB).

 

16. Can I use Wasabi ball to migrate data between geographical regions?

Wasabi ball is only available as a data transport solution for moving large amount of data into and out of a designated Wasabi cloud geographical region. For use cases that require data transfer between wasabi cloud geographical regions, we recommend using Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager.

 

17. Can I purchase Wasabi ball?

Wasabi ball is only available on a monthly rental basis and not available for purchase at this time.

 

18. When can I delete my data after copying to Wasabi ball?

Once customer receives confirmation from Wasabi that the data transfer has been completed by Wasabi, it is customer's responsibility to verify all the data is accessible to the customer as expected, before deleting your local copy.

 

19. Can I request Wasabi to not delete my data from WB after it has been uploaded to Wasabi cloud?

No. Wasabi has an automated workflow process to securely erase all the data from Wasabi ball once ingest has been completed.

 

20. When does the 30-day charging period for Wasabi Ball start?

The 30-day rental period starts the day Wasabi ships the ball to the customer and ends when Wasabi receives the ball back.

 

21. What file network protocols does Wasabi Ball support?

Wasabi Ball can support SMB, NFS, RSYNC, AFP, FTP, HTTP and S3.

 

22. Why Wasabi Ball? Why not Wasabi Direct Connect?

A. Wasabi Ball will be a more cost-effective solution than Wasabi Direct Connect in most cases. If you are not sure about which of the two is a better product for your use case, please contact your sales rep or our sales team (sales@wasabi.com). We will help find the right solution based on your needs.

 

23. Are there any limitations to keep in mind when using Wasabi Ball?

S3 Object lock is not supported when loading data to Wasabi Ball.

 

24. What are the terms and conditions to use Wasabi Ball service?

https://wasabi.com/legal/wasabi-ball-terms/