The Data Box Heavy has several advantages over its smaller brother, which launched last year and became generally available in March. It supports a massive 1 petabyte, rather than 100 terabytes, with 770TB usable capacity vs 80. It also comes with multiple 40 Gbps connectors, which means a whole datacenter can be moved in just a few weeks. The Data Box Heavy is available in the US and EU to start. Meanwhile, the regular Data Box and DataBox Disk are available in more regions, including Japan, Canada, Australia, Korea, and Southeast Asia. As you’d expect, this kind of large-scale data transfer doesn’t come cheap. The Data Box Heavy import service fee is $1000, plus shipping. As a 500lb, 48-inch long device, the shipping is unlikely to be cheap. Comparatively, the service fee for the regular Data Box is $250. Essentially, it would cost you at least $2500 to get the same amount of storage in the smaller boxes. “After your data is transferred to Azure, the appliance is wiped clean according to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards,” explains Azure Data Box general manager Dean Parton. As well as physical transfers, Microsoft offers online ones via Data Box Gateway and Data Box Edge. Edge is an on-premises network appliance for moving data, while gateway is a virtual appliance.
