General Availability of Azure Data Box Edge Appliance Released

Last week Microsoft announced that GA versions of Azure Data Box Edge and Azure Data Box Gateway are now available through the Microsoft Azure Portal. Azure Data Box Edge, the "1U rack-mountable appliance" made by Microsoft, was at the preview stage back in September 2018. It can be used to help with compute and storage tasks before transferring data to Azure datacenters. Back in September Microsoft has also announced the general availability of its rentable storage device, Azure Data Box, for physically transferring up to 100TB of data to Microsoft for installation on Azure infrastructure. It's also offered as a 1PB Azure Data Box Heavy storage device, which is still at the preview stage. There's also an 8TB Azure Data Box Disk storage device that's currently available for lighter Azure data transfers. Azure Data Box Edge is a more specialized appliance that can be "racked alongside your existing enterprise hardware or live in non-traditional environments from factory floors to retail aisles," according to Microsoft's announcement. It's designed to support a few edge computing and storage tasks. For instance, Azure Data Box Edge supports running applications in containers. It supports local caching of frequently used data, while automatically transferring other data to the Azure Storage service. Azure Data Box Edge also lets users conduct machine learning operations locally via an included Intel Arria 10 field programmable gate array, although this machine learning capability is still at the preview stage.