Adding Azure Data Box Storage

Azure Data Box is a physical device which you can request for a short period of time from Microsoft. It can be temporarily attached to the backup infrastructure and used as an object storage. For more information about ordering Azure Data Box and preparing to use it, see this Microsoft article.

This device might become useful when you need to offload a significant number of backup files occupying storage space on your extents, as offloading data to the Azure Data Box device is much faster than transferring the same amount of data directly to Azure object storage. Once you have offloaded backups to Azure Data Box, you need to ship the device back to Microsoft for further data synchronization with your Azure storage account, as described in Seeding Backups to Azure Blob Storage.

Consider the following:

• Veeam Backup & Replication supports only those Azure Data Box devices that are capable of reading and writing data using REST API. The Azure Data Box disk type is not supported.
• Direct data copy to the archive tier from Azure Data Box is not supported. When you place your order, do not enable Copy to archive option on the Data destination step.
• When you configure a scale-out backup repository with Azure Data Box as the capacity extent, it is recommended to only use the copy policy. This way you keep copy of the data on your local storage which helps you reduce the risk of data loss if the device is damaged during shipping. It will also ensure that the backup data is available for restore operations while Azure Data Box is in shipment.

For information about other limitations for Microsoft Azure Data Box storage, see this Microsoft article.

To add Microsoft Azure Data Box storage, do the following:

1. Perform the steps described in the Before You Begin section.
2. Specify object storage name
3. Specify object storage account
4. Specify object storage settings
5. Finish working with the wizard