Microsoft lifts the lid on the Azure Storsimple 8000 series

MICROSOFT HAS PREMIERED Storsimple, the latest addition to its Azure Cloud.

Storsimple is a hybrid approach that is intended to provide a seamless transition between physical onsite data, and the Azure cloud, designed to be fully scalable at a moment's notice.

In addition it also allows for backup of data sets or complete drives for disaster recovery purposes, offering incremental recovery of information without having to restore entire volumes.

New additions to the range are the Storsimple 8100 and Storsimple 8600, both solid state arrays with gigabit connections offering consolidated management of data saved in the cloud with Azure Storsimple Manager. In addition, the Storsimple Virtual Appliance allows customers to access on-premises data in the same seamless way and easily run development, testing and search processes.

Microsoft claims that Storsimple saves the average customer between 40 and 60 percent over an all-cloud or all-SSD solution.

At a briefing before the launch, Marc Farley, senior product marketing manager for Storsimple told the press, 'Storsimple helps customers manage data growth by automatically tiering inactive data to the cloud which is no longer being used. Enterprises have a lot of that. It's like silt in your storage system which just piles up.

'With a hybrid solution, you don't have the expense of tape, courier services or off-site storage, or the expense of having two systems. Because you don't have to spend time managing this and your data centre doesn't fill up with storage, your IT organisation is a lot more agile.'

Full specifications and pricing for the Storsimple 8000 range will be announced shortly, ahead a launch on August 1st.

Earlier this year, Microsoft bought New Zealand firm Greenbutton and integrated it into Azure, allowing applications to be run with no recoding required. µ