Azure Data Box is Microsoft’s answer to AWS Snowball

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Transferring hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data between your on-premises data centers to another public cloud vendor’s data center will take weeks to months. Amazon came up with a solution called Snowball which is a physical storage appliance that can be used by enterprise customers to transfer their data physically. Today, Microsoft is aouncing their similar solution called Azure Data Box. The new Azure Data Box is a 45 pound, ruggedized, tamper-resistant, and human-manageable hardware appliance that can be used to transfer up to 100 TB of data.

Azure Data Box is built to meet the following needs for our customers:

• Secure – Tamper-resistant appliance which supports 256 bit AES encryption on your data
• Tough – Built using the toughest materials to handle the inevitable bumps and bruises during transport, without requiring external packaging
• Easy to use –Plugs right into your network, can store approximately 100 TB, and uses NAS protocols (SMB/CIFS)
• Simple – Rent it, fill it up and return it – all tracked in the Azure Portal
• Partner Supported – Integrated with a global array of industry-leading Azure partners

You can read about the partners who support Azure Data Box here.