StorSimple Uses Cloud Services for Three-Tier Storage

StorSimple uses on-premises hardware and cloud services to provide hybrid tiered storage, backup, and disaster recovery for data and applications. StorSimple will be attractive to organizations that have long-term data storage needs and want to take advantage of economies of scale and use global data centers or migrate to Microsoft’s online services. However, the high cost of the on-premises hardware makes the StorSimple solution interesting primarily to large customers.

StorSimple Adds Hybrid Cloud Storage

StorSimple, acquired by Microsoft in 2012, provides a hybrid storage capability using on-premises hardware appliances and connections to cloud storage to help organizations reduce the increasing costs of on-premises storage, address disaster recovery (DR) requirements, and maintain control over security. An installation uses dedicated solid-state disks (SSDs), traditional hard drives (HDDs), and cloud storage such as Azure Storage or other cloud storage providers, resulting in a three-tier storage solution. (See the illustration “StorSimple On-Premises Hardware“.) Hot spare drives provide fault tolerance. Software provided with StorSimple can automatically decide where the data resides—frequently accessed data is stored on the SSDs, while rarely accessed data and applications are migrated to the cloud.