Offline Data Transfer to Azure Cloud Storage? Use Microsoft Data Box

In September 2018, Microsoft unveiled the general availability of Microsoft Data Box.

The company unveiled new online capabilities, Azure Data Box Edge and Azure Data Box Gateway, have emerged as preview releases. Microsoft also introduced the preview of Data Box Heavy, basically a one petabyte version of Data Box.

Azure Data Box Edge is on-premise storage appliance with AI capabilities. The on-premise data can be moved or copied to the appliance and it further moves data to Azure storage. From the documents available, it infers that it is similar in copying on-premise data to a local network share and things are automatically taken care to transfer data to remote Azure cloud storage.

It means Data Box Edge appliance acts as a local cache that optimizes network traffic to and from Azure cloud. The appliance also provides a computing platform via IoT Edge allowing users to deploy Azure services and custom applications.

The announcement said, "you can analyze, filter, or transform your data right at the edge as part of your workflow. And to accelerate machine-learning workloads, Data Box Edge has FPGA option powered by Microsoft’s Project Brainwave."

Microsoft’s Project Brainwave is still in preview mode.

Another variant of Microsoft Data Box family of products is Data Box Gateway. It is essentially a Virtual appliance that can be deployed independently.

Data Box Heavy is 1 PB (PetaBytes) of a raw capacity version of Data Box with 40 Gbps connectors. According to the announcement, this means that "a datacenter’s worth of data can be moved into Azure in a few weeks’ time."

Customer Validation

The blog announcement listed customer experience with Microsoft Data Box and said, "For the last several months, we've been working directly with customers on these new products. Cree, an innovator of power and radio frequency semiconductors, turned to Azure Data Box edge to archive millions of quality-control photos from their manufacturing process. Cree uses the edge computing capabilities of Data Box Edge to package all the images for a part into an archival file, which simplifies future retrieval and management of the data. With all their data in Azure, Cree plans to improve their manufacturing efficiency by using Azure Machine Learning to develop a model that can run locally on Data Box Edge to identify bad parts in real time as they are produced."

Microsoft Data Box Product Availability

Microsoft Data Box Gateway, Microsoft Data Box Edge and Microsoft Data Box Heavy are available in preview mode.

To summarize, Microsoft Data Box and Microsoft Data Box Heavy are available for offline-data transfer. Microsoft Data Box Gateway and Microsoft Data Box Edge are available for online-data transfer to and from Azure cloud storage.

Further information on Microsoft Data Box family of products is available here.