Microsoft announced general availability of its Azure Data Box Edge and the Azure Data Box Gateway for on-premise deployment.
Data Box Edge, which is described as an on-premises anchor point for Azure, is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis, just like any other Azure service and the hardware is included. This 1U rack-mountable appliance provides:
- Local Compute – Run containerized applications at your location. Use these to interact with your local systems or to pre-process your data before it transfers to Azure.
- Network Storage Gateway – Automatically transfer data between the local appliance and your Azure Storage account. Data Box Edge caches the hottest data locally and speaks file and object protocols to your on-premises applications.
- Azure Machine Learning utilizing an Intel Arria 10 FPGA – Use the on-board Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to accelerate inferencing of your data, then transfer it to the cloud to re-train and improve your models. Learn more about the Azure Machine Learning announcement.
- Cloud managed – Easily order your device and manage these capabilities for your fleet from the cloud using the Azure Portal.
Data Box Gateway is also available as a standalone virtual appliance on a pay-as-you-go basis. It can be provisioned it in a hypervisor, using either Hyper-V or VMware, and managed through the Azure Portal. Server message block (SMB) or network file system (NFS) shares will be set up on the local network. Data landing on these shares will automatically upload to your Azure Storage account, supporting Block Blob, Page Blob, or Azure Files. We’ll handle the network retries and optimize network bandwidth for you. Multiple network interfaces mean the appliance can either sit on your local network or in a DMZ, giving your systems access to Azure Storage without having to open network connections to Azure.
In addition to Data Box Edge and Data Box Gateway, Azure announced three sizes of Data Box for offline data transfer:
Data Box – a ruggedized 100 TB transport appliance
Data Box Disk – a smaller, more nimble transport option with individual 8 TB disks and up to 40 TB per order
Data Box Heavy Preview – a bigger version of Data Box that can scale to 1 PB.