StorSimple 1000, 5000 and 7000 Series

StorSimple announces the availability of the StorSimple 1000, 5000 and 7000 series of application-optimized cloud storage appliances.

These devices utilize a ‘cloud-as-a-tier’ architecture to increase the performance and extend the storage capabilities of business-critical Microsoft applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft File Servers and Virtual Machine libraries.

Enterprise content is exploding at 50 to 60 percent per year driven by use of applications such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Shared Drives and modern virtual machine libraries. Each time a minor change is made to a file, a completely new version is created, resulting in an explosion of stored content when only a working set of data is required. The working set requires rapid access whereas the other content can be stored on slower disks or the cloud. The cloud is a new architecture and requires new approaches to realize its full benefit. It can’t be treated as a dumb disk at the end of a wide-area network. To get the security and performance required, enterprises need sophisticated cloud-as-a-tier management.

"When it comes to using cloud storage to deal with the explosion of content, companies need to think like Bing and Google search algorithms for storage, meaning that they should not treat all content the same, just as these search engines treat every web page differently to present the most important content on the first page," said Ursheet Parikh, CEO of StorSimple. "We take the same approach to cloud storage through software in StorSimple appliances that automatically deduplicate content, reducing storage requirements by a factor of 10. Every block is then ranked through a unique BlockRank algorithm to determine the working set of data that is necessary for every day operations, while automatically moving less used data, which can make up nearly 75 percent of a business’ data, to the cloud. This gives enterprises the best-of-both worlds – SSD performance and the elasticity of the cloud.”

By keeping frequently accessed data on premise, application performance remains high and data is kept within company security protocols. Applications using the StorSimple appliance reap the performance and security benefits of keeping applications and working set data on premise, while shifting the burden of less frequently accessed content storage to the cloud. This has a major impact on performance both for regular application workloads and also backup and recovery as only the working set has to be moved to the cloud.

With only 25 percent of content stored on premise and a deduplication ratio of 10, this means instead of backing up a complete dataset over a WAN, StorSimple needs to move a mere 2.5 percent. For recovery, the volume group can be immediately mounted and the working set accessed compared to moving the whole backup over the WAN.

Application-Optimized Cloud Storage
StorSimple takes cloud storage one step further with an application-optimization plug-in architecture. This maximizes the performance of each volume of an application knowing whether to store the data on SSD, SAS drive or the cloud with a unique application-specific BlockRank algorithm. For example, with SharePoint, the database is always stored on SSD whereas the content, including large objects like audio, video and CAD drawings, can be spread over SSD, SAS drive or the cloud. This application plug-in extends to Microsoft VSS consistent application backup and restore.

In addition, a redundant disaster recovery center is out of the reach of many organizations. Cloud economics, coupled with StorSimple’s CloudClone architecture mean everyone can now afford a disaster recovery center – paying for it only when it’s used.

"We’re using StorSimple for backup and recovery, Microsoft Exchange archiving and migrating file share data to SharePoint 2010," said Ryan Dengate, IT manager for Pine Rest Health Services. "As its name implies, StorSimple takes the first step of BLOB externalization and marries it to backup really easily. It took very little time to get up and running and creating business use cases."

The StorSimple series of appliances support cloud storage providers Amazon, AT&T, EMC, Iron Mountain and Microsoft Azure. The range of appliances includes embedded security and encryption protocols as well as tools for easy cloud backup and recovery, primary storage deduplication, and application-aware thin provisioning.