Microsoft on Wednesday announced a number of enhancements to the Azure cloud service including the availability of two new StorSimple storage arrays, as an answer to the managed stream processing services rolled out by its rivals Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform recently.
The new “Hybrid Storage Arrays” – StorSimple 8000 series arrays – 8100 and 8600 – branded as Microsoft Azure StorSimple 8000, to be available starting August 1, will be integrated with 2 new Azure services from the company – the Azure StorSimple Manager and the Azure StorSimple Virtual Appliance.
Microsoft said that the new arrays, both with encryption packing 10G Ethernet connections, will come with capacity of 15-40TB and 40-100TB of local storage, along with 200TB and 500TB storage in the cloud respectively.
The Virtual Appliance service will enable disaster recovery and provides access to local data via Azure, while the StorSimple Manager consolidates management of all Azure and StorSimple platforms for the cloud. Microsoft claims that StorSimple saves an average customer around 40 to 60 percent over all-cloud costs.
The software giant, since the acquisition of cloud-storage vendor StorSimple in 2012, has kept news about the StorSimple services tightly under wraps, except for the last year’s claim by the officials that StorSimple is on the fast track to become one of next billion dollar businesses for Microsoft.
Marc Farley, senior product marketing manager for StorSimple said at a briefing before the launch that StorSimple automatically tiers up data that is no longer used to help customers manage data growth.
He added that with a hybrid solution, the organizations are a lot more agile, and there is no need to spend time managing or no expenses involved or even the data centre doesn’t fill up with storage.
