Microsoft Announces General Availability for the Microsoft Azure StorSimple Virtual Array

March 2, 2016

By Meghan Liese, Senior Product Marketing Manager, StorSimple

Today’s enterprises are embracing digital transformation and are strategically defining revenue generating experiences as a key strategy to their growth. A byproduct of this rapid transformation is massive amounts of business data that is experiencing a double digit increase every year. This has directly resulted in rising storage costs, growing storage infrastructure footprint and increasing complexity of storage and data management within enterprises of all sizes. This is creating significant hurdles for IT to scale efficiently in support of the growing demands of the business.

However, the time has come to transition the focus of IT from infrastructure management to business agility, where the goal is not just connecting storage and server infrastructure, but rather connecting data to the users and applications quickly and efficiently. A key to this transition is the adoption of the cloud.

With Microsoft Azure StorSimple, customers have reduced their storage costs, eliminated infrastructure sprawl, simplified data management and increased IT agility to help transform their businesses. “Prior to StorSimple, we simply added more and more storage to accommodate growing data,” says Lee Bingham, Head of IT for leading European fashion designer Paul Smith. “Now we are using StorSimple to create policies that automatically archive data to Azure storage in the cloud if it hasn’t been accessed in 12 months.”

Today we are announcing the general availability of the StorSimple Virtual Array, as part of the overall StorSimple product offering for Microsoft Azure. The StorSimple Virtual Array provides hybrid cloud storage using a VM that can be run on Hyper-V or VMware hypervisors and supports either a Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN) configuration. The StorSimple Virtual Array also delivers integrated primary storage, data protection, archiving, and disaster recovery capabilities in a single, easy to deploy solution designed for small, remote environments where there is minimal IT infrastructure and management.

With the StorSimple Virtual Array, customers no longer need to centralize data protection and disaster recovery at the main datacenter. Instead, the StorSimple Virtual Array allows customers to have a highly scalable, consistent, and cost-effective approach to managing data growth and data protection across all their environments, including remote and branch offices. Rand Morimoto, President of Convergent Computing, an early adopter of the StorSimple Virtual Array explains that, “Microsoft has helped us consolidate several storage solutions into a comprehensive strategy that includes high speed appliance-based storage, versatile and cost effective Virtual Array technology with a hybrid integration of our storage needs on-premises and the agility of extending storage and backup into the cloud.”

The StorSimple Virtual Array is available to all Microsoft Azure customers with an Enterprise Agreement. The StorSimple Virtual Array is managed by the StorSimple Manager, which provides a single point of management along with other StorSimple solutions.

With today’s announcements, we are excited that more enterprises can adopt a hybrid storage strategy based on StorSimple to transform their businesses – by reducing costs, simplifying IT processes and helping increase IT agility in support of their business goals.

According to leading storage analyst firm Taneja Group, “Microsoft Azure StorSimple efficiently extends the local storage infrastructure into the cloud. With the Virtual Array, StorSimple does so much more. Now the enterprise can bring remote and branch offices into the fold with virtualized StorSimple arrays that can run from remote office premises, or in case of a disaster, from Azure. Virtual Array rounds out the StorSimple product family and lets Microsoft broadly expand its customer base to ROBO locations,“ states Arun Taneja, Founder, Taneja Group