Azure Data Box Appliance Transfers 100TB to Azure

• The Azure Data Box appliance-based service could help organizations with off-site data archival, backup, and migration.
• Data Box can only import data into Azure, not export.
• Turnaround speed limits the service to specific uses.

Azure Data Box (in preview) allows customers to transfer large volumes of data from on-premises, including third-party storage solutions, to Azure Storage.

Data Box Usage

With the Data Box service, customers rent Data Box appliances from Microsoft, load them with data, and ship them to Microsoft for data import into Azure Storage. Customers can then keep the imported data in Azure Storage or use the data to populate other Azure services. Azure Storage offers several scalable data storage services, including Blob storage for unstructured data and File storage for traditional Server Message Block (SMB) protocol file shares.

Customers will likely use Data Box for the following scenarios:

Long-term archival. The service enables transfer of large volumes of data to Azure File and Azure Blob storage for persistent, redundant, online storage that could enable customers to avoid purchasing large on-premises storage solutions for rarely accessed data.