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Azure Data Family Expands with Edge and Gateway Offerings
Today Microsoft announced the general availability of its Azure Data Box, along with new online capabilities -- Azure Data Box Edge and Azure Data Box Gateway -- both in preview. In addition, the company is addressing the needs for extra large offline data transfers by introducing the 1PB Azure Data Box Heavy, which is also in preview.
According to the blog post, Data Box Edge is an "on-premises appliance with AI-enabled edge compute capabilities" and will be able to act as a storage gateway, "creating a link between your site and Azure storage." By providing a local cache, Data Box can help optimize network traffic to and from the cloud.
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The Azure Data Box Family Source: Microsoft
An IoT Edge computing platform is also provided by Data Box Edge, "which lets you deploy Azure services and custom code and applications to the edge." Microsoft claims this will allow you to analyze, filter or transform data right at the edge. And for machine-learning workloads, Microsoft's Project Brainwave will power the FPGA option.
For those who only want to deploy the storage gateway functionality on their own systems, Data Box Gateway will be available as a standalone virtual appliance.
As for the very large amounts of data that need to be moved, Data Box Heavy offers 1PB raw capacity and along with 40 Gbps, it allows for an entire datacenter's worth of data to be moved to Azure in a few weeks' time, according to the blog post.
For more information and to sign up for the previews, visit the blog post.
About the Author
Wendy Hernandez is group managing editor for the 1105 Enterprise Computing Group.