Last time, I talked about cloud backup and the two different ways of doing it – directly and using StorSimple appliance (which you can find here and here). I notice some others are looking at the same and would like to share more information on this device and the test that I did with it. I will try to break in down into 2 parts for easier reading.

I mention that there are 2 version of the device – 8100 and 8600, where the only difference is the storage size within it, 8100 have maximum available storage of 200TB and 8600 have the maximum available storage of 500TB. Below table shows in more details of each model:

Both model have 10GB iSCSI connections and provide full multi-path I/O, dual controllers, dual power supplies and dual cooling, along with RAID and hot spares and all the redundancies you would expect out of an enterprise-class device.

The main difference compare to other storage array in the market is that it utilize Azure storage as one of its tier storage, auto-tiering is fully supported in both model and is the key for it to achieve its maximum storage. With local SSD storage, it can provide fast I/O which balance cost and performance for this devices.

Depends on which part of the world you live in, the price might be different for these devices, from where I live, you would only require to have Azure credit commitment (for year 1) and you will get the device for free, on the later years it will charged based on your actual usage. I would assume it will be the same across the world, it would be best to change with Microsoft.

One of the downside of those devices is that they cannot be upgraded, and cannot add additional storage to it, unlike many other competitors, they were able to expand and add additional storage array to provide more storage for the box. But for the MS appliance, we do not have that option, when you run out of space, the only option you have is to have another storage and split your data.

Microsoft says the data pass back and forth to the cloud storage tier is encrypted both in transit and at rest, its fully protected and cannot be access in any ways. With the dedupes based on Windows Server 2012 deduplication technology it can achieve a very good dedupes ratio (depends on your usage), generally speaking it can reduce by around 66%.

One key feature of the device can perform cloud backup, which can save on the backup infrastructure. With virtual StorSimple device, you can even clone your backup to the virtual device and present it to Azure VM for testing.

That is the general overview of StorSimple, next up I will go in to details of the performance result we tested in our lab, stay tuned.