Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Data Box Disk, which is basically an SSD based solution for offline data transfer to the Azure cloud platform.
This was officially confirmed in a blog post.
The public preview of the Azure Data Box Disk was released in the middle July 2018, and allowed customers to load data on encrypted SSD disks via a USB/SATA interface for secure data transfer and provide forward/return shipping to Microsoft data centers in the EU and the United States.
Now, with the general availability, customers in the US, EU, Canada, and Australia can use this solution, with Microsoft announcing that more countries and regions would be added over time.
Redmond advertises this feature as a hybrid cloud solution, allowing customers to import their data into Azure using portable solid-state disks. The company provides these SSDs in 8TB capacities, and they have 7TB of usable space.
A maximum of up to five disks are provided, for a maximum of 35TB that a customer can transfer.
Furthermore, the cloud giant also offers two other offline data transfer products for users with higher requirements. Azure Data Box is good for up to 80TB usable capacity, while Azure Data Box Heavy that is still in preview takes in 800TB of data.
Of course, competing cloud providers also offers offline data transfer capabilities.
Google, for example, has its Transfer Appliance that can carry 200TB. IBM has its Cloud Mass Data Migration service with up to 120TB of capacity, and Amazon Snowball offers a capacity of up to 80TB in one go.
The company also announced the public preview of Azure Data Box Blob Storage – a feature that allows customers to copy data to Blob Storage on a Data Box.
