INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
AWS has its Snowball (and Snowmobile truck), Google Cloud has its data transfer appliance and Microsoft has its Azure Data Box
All of these are physical appliances that allow enterprises to ship lots of data to the cloud by uploading it into these machines and then
shipping them to the cloud
Microsoft Azure Data Box launched intopreview about a year ago and today, the company is announcing a number of updates and adding a few new
boxes, too.
First of all, the standard 50-pound, 100-terabyte Data Box is now generally available
If you&ve got a lot of data to transfer to the cloud — or maybe collect a lot of offline data — then FedEx will happily pick this one
up and Microsoft will upload the data to Azure and charge you for your storage allotment.
If you&ve got a lot more data, though, then
Microsoft now also offers the Azure Data Box Heavy
This new box, which is now in preview, can hold up to one petabyte of data
Microsoft did not say how heavy the Data Box Heavy is, though.
Also new is the Azure Data Box Edge, which is now also in preview
In many ways, this is the most interesting of the additions since it goes well beyond transporting data
As the name implies, Data Box Edge is meant for edge deployments where a company collects data
What makes this version stand out is that it basically a small data center rack that lets you process data as it comes in
It even includes an FPGA to run AI algorithms at the edge.
Using this box, enterprises can collect the data, transform and analyze it on
the box, and then send it to Azure over the network (and not in a truck)
Using this, users can cut back on bandwidth cost and don''t have to send all of their data to the cloud for processing.
Also part of the
same Data Box family is the Data Box Gateway
This is a virtual appliance, however, that runs on Hyper-V and VMWare and lets users create a data transfer gateway for importing data in
That not quite as interesting as a hardware appliance but useful nonetheless.
