Introducing Microsoft Azure StorSimple

This announcement has been made on a blog of Microsoft by Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s office corporate VP, cloud and enterprise marketing.

I am excited to announce the Microsoft Azure StorSimple solution.

Available August 1, this offering builds on the success of previous StorSimple offerings that automate and eliminate one of the biggest problems facing IT organizations – double digit data growth and the storage capacity and data protection complexities that come with it.

Customers around the world such as Mazda, SK Telecom, Paul Smith, Sundance Film Festival, GF Health Products, Black and Veatch, and the City of San Jose, CA have simplified their storage infrastructures with StorSimple hybrid cloud storage solutions.

The StorSimple 8000 series hybrid storage arrays are powerful StorSimple systems and have even tighter integration with Azure, including two new Azure-based capabilities to enable new use cases and centralize data management. These new solutions demonstrate how Microsoft is bringing the best of storage together with the cloud in order to deliver bottom line savings to customers by cutting storage costs from 40% to 60% and helping IT teams focus more on business strategies than infrastructure management.

The StorSimple 8000 series arrays come in two flavors to meet a variety of capacity and performance needs: the StorSimple 8100 and the StorSimple 8600. These are enterprise hybrid storage arrays with a twist – instead of being limited to only SSDs and HDDs, these arrays use Azure Storage as a hybrid cloud tier for automatic capacity expansion and off-site data protection. That means IT teams don’t have to spend so much time and effort working on the next inevitable storage capacity upgrade or managing the complex details of data protection. Data stored on StorSimple 8000 series arrays is automatically protected off-site by cloud snapshots, which fill the enormous gap between problematic tape solutions and costly remote replication solutions.

To go with the new arrays, there is the Azure StorSimple Virtual Appliance, which is an implementation of StorSimple technology running as an Azure VM in the cloud. With a matching Azure StorSimple VM, StorSimple 8000 series customers can run applications in Azure that access snapshot virtual volumes in the cloud. Customers will be able to run new applications that search and analyze historical datasets without disrupting production work in their datacenter. This StorSimple Virtual Appliance not only works for data from Windows Server and Hyper-V, but on-premises Linux and VMware servers, as well, providing hybrid cloud capabilities for the most common server platforms.

The Virtual Appliance also enables DR in the cloud. Virtualized applications that store their data on an Azure StorSimple array in a customer’s datacenter can be restarted in VMs in Azure with access to previously uploaded data. Updates to data made during recovery operations can be downloaded later to StorSimple arrays on-premises when normal operations resume.

DR is an area of concern for many customers and they seldom get a chance to test their abilities. Azure StorSimple 8000 Series arrays and Virtual Appliances have a feature called Instant Recovery, which presents synthetic, full images of virtual volumes in Azure to applications and end users so they can start accessing data as soon as possible after a disaster. Instant recovery accelerates restores and DR testing by only downloading data that is needed and bypassing data that isn’t needed.

Another capability in this release is the Azure StorSimple Manager, which consolidates management for all of a customer’s Azure StorSimple 8000 series arrays and Virtual Appliances. Administrators use the Manager to centrally control all aspects of StorSimple storage and data management from the cloud, so they can ensure consistent operations and data protection/retention policies across the enterprise. The StorSimple Manager also gives administrators a dashboard with up-to-the-minute status and reports so they can spot storage troubles and trends and allows the IT team to spend less time on storage infrastructure management and shift resources to business applications.

StorSimple customers have been seeing the financial and IT efficiency benefits of hybrid cloud storage for years. Now, the Azure StorSimple solution brings innovations to enable greater operational efficiency, and is an example of technology developed with a hybrid cloud design point and critical customer needs in mind.