Media Query Source: Part 34 MSDynamicsWorld (US digital magazine)Azure Data Box family of productsCounterpart to AWS Snow family of productsData ingre
The responses I provided to a media outlet on January 27, 2022:
Media: What are the biggest gaps in Data Box capabilities, if any?
Gfesser: The Azure Data Box family of products is essentially used to get data into Azure, focusing on storage optimized hardware.
In contrast, the AWS Snow family of products also offers compute optimized hardware, which can be additionally used to permit some processing of data during a given data transfer, such as execution of ML.
Additionally, the Azure Data Box family of products is limited with respect to usable capacity. AWS offers up to 100 PB bulk data transfer whereas Data Box is limited to 1 PB.
Media: How does it compare to any similar offerings from other cloud providers or technology companies?
Gfesser: The Azure Data Box family of products is essentially Microsoft's counterpart to the AWS Snow family of products, which was initially made publicly available a couple years prior (GCP also introduced Transfer Appliance at around the same time).
All of these services make use of physical appliances to transfer data to each respective public cloud, because of the large volumes of data involved and the time it would otherwise take to directly transfer over the wire using an internet connection.
Each physical Azure Data Box device has a usable storage capacity of 80 TB, the same as each physical AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized device, although AWS also offers AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized to enable additional data processing, with a less usable storage capacity of 42 TB as a tradeoff.
In addition to Azure Data Box, Azure also offers Data Box Disk with a usable capacity of up to 35 TB and Data Box Heavy with a usable capacity of up to 1 PB, as well as Data Box Gateway virtual appliance which permits continuous data transfer.
The AWS counterpart to Azure Data Box Disk is AWS Snowcone, the newest member of the AWS Snow family. While no AWS counterpart to Azure Data Box Heavy exists, AWS provides a significantly larger offering called AWS Snowmobile with a usable capacity of up to 100 PB.
Additionally, AWS offers AWS DataSync, outside its Snow family of products, to provide similar functionality as Azure Data Box Gateway.
Media: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Gfesser: Generally speaking, public clouds tend to charge significantly less for ingress (ingestion) of data than for egress (extraction) of data.
In the end, all public cloud services are used to process data in one way or another, and storage tends to be much less expensive than compute.
And the logic behind these differences in costs is understandable from a business perspective. Availability of data provides a means to make use of the many, typically much more costly public cloud services offered to customers.
See all of my responses to media queries here.