Use Snowflake with IDrive® e2 for vast data storage
Snowflake External Tables are verified to use with IDrive® e2 S3-compatible object storage. This integration provides a cheaper S3-compatible cloud storage alternative for Snowflake users to store their unstructured and semi-structured data.
IDrive® e2 provides predictable pricing with no egress, ingress, or API charges as opposed to first-generation cloud storage providers. It is also ideal for Snowflake users in building data lakes — vast storage repositories where they can collect massive volumes of a wide variety of raw data, sans the trouble of deciding which data to collect, where to store, and how long to retain.
IDrive® e2 Hot Cloud Storage Benefits for Snowflake Users
Snowflake external stages: IDrive® e2 can be used as a cloud object storage for Snowflake external stages and external tables. As external stages are located outside the Snowflake account, customers bear an additional cost to own and manage them. By using IDrive® e2 storage, they can leverage the no egress and API charges policy to avoid paying typical API and operation charges when AWS, Azure, Google, and Cloudflare R2, etc are used.
Diverse unstructured data storage: You can store massive volumes of unstructured data (business documents, videos, emails, audio files) and semi-structured data (JSON, Avro, ORC, Parquet, and XML files). The wide variety of stored data can be used to populate the Snowflake database tables. It enables organizations to store the raw data in unstructured form at an inexpensive price and structure it as and when required.
Multi-cloud capability: You can use your Snowflake external tables staged on IDrive® e2 as part of a multi-cloud data lake implementation to avoid vendor lock-in. With its cross-cloud capabilities, your data will no longer be locked into a particular cloud or region. It thus lets you scale your data lake computing and storage resources and choose from the best of vendors.
Collaborative data sharing: Snowflake External Tables stored in IDrive® e2 can be shared with multiple users. It is ideal for collaborative environments that require distributing workloads and data sharing like media and entertainment industry, healthcare, and financial services. For instance, a user running Snowflake on AWS with External Tables stored in IDrive® e2 can easily allow access to another user running Snowflake on a different cloud storage platform in another region.
Utility pricing with no surprise bills: While AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud object storage services are inherently costly, IDrive® e2 as an External Stage for Snowflake data lake is an affordable alternative for users as it doesn't incur PUT charges for data upload. Also, IDrive® e2 doesn't charge a fee for API calls. Moreover, while collaborative partners access External Tables and use the stored unstructured data to populate it, these platforms incur egress charges. Unlike these storage platforms, IDrive® e2 doesn't impose extra charges to retrieve data from storage.
IDrive® e2 hot cloud storage provides affordable pricing when compared to AWS S3 Google Cloud, and Azure. Visit the pricing page to see a comparison.