StorSimple Likely to address Gaps in Azure Storage

 

Cloud Integrated storage primarily for backup, archival and disaster recovery story sounds an interesting proposition for MSTF.  Looking for an pure applicability standpoint If one takes a closer look at enterprise grade application which is deployed on the cloud the following areas which are data concerns to the customer

• Backup of structured and unstructured data
• Archival Strategy and Implementation with Quick Retrieval of archived data.
• Virtual Machine Backup and Restoration
• Disaster Recovery.
• Snapshot Recover for data
• Stringent Data Security
• Applications level backup and recoveries, windows file shares, SharePoint libraries and version control.

If I take a good closer look at Windows Azure what we have in the name of DR is maintaining 3 copies of the data across the data center which kind addresses the availability aspect, the Archival Strategy is totally missed out, Snapshot recovery to a specific point in time is not possible.

Application level snapshot with version control is non existent.  StorSimple does bring a unique value proposition for addressing storage in complete scheme of things for both on premise and cloud.

It would be interesting to see how does the Azure Storage end up harnessing the benefits of StorSimple to fill in the gaps of its storage strategy.  Moreover relooking into the Sql Azure storage to utilize StorSimple for backup / restore , snapshot restore, archival would be good. It would be long before these features start showing up into Sql Azure, I’m hoping it comes by end of next year as of current Sql Azure has no backup/ restore or archival features.

In addition of Azure , Office 365 can also end up leverage StorSimple.

They are quite a few gaps in the storage strategy of Windows Azure as current.

The complete article can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/11/15/microsoft-acquires-storsimple.aspx.