A research institute needs to migrate 200 Terabytes of scientific data from their on-premises SAN to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

Their datacenter has a 100 Mbps internet connection, which is heavily utilized by daily operations. They calculate that transferring this data over the network would take over 6 months. They need the data in Azure within 3 weeks.

Which Azure service should you recommend?

When network bandwidth is a bottleneck and you have massive amounts of data (terabytes to petabytes) that must be migrated quickly, offline data transfer is the solution. Azure Data Box is a ruggedized physical storage appliance that Microsoft ships to your datacenter. You connect it to your local network, copy the 200 TB of data at high LAN speeds, and ship it back to an Azure datacenter where it is uploaded to your storage account. This easily meets the 3-week deadline.