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StorSimple optimises cloud storage
6 December 2010
StorSimple, recently named ‘most promising cloud technology provider’ by UP-Con, has now made available its StorSimple 1000, 5000 and 7000 series of application-optimised cloud storage appliances. Deployed on-premise, these devices use a ‘cloud-as-a-tier’ architecture to increase the performance and extend the storage capabilities of business-critical Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Exchange Server, File Servers and Virtual Machine libraries.
“When it comes to using cloud storage to deal with the explosion of content, companies need to think like Bing and Google search algorithms for storage, meaning that they should not treat all content the same, just as these search engines treat every web page differently to present the most important content on the first page,” said Ursheet Parikh, CEO of StorSimple. “We take the same approach to cloud storage through software in StorSimple appliances that automatically deduplicate content, reducing storage requirements by a factor of 10. Every block is then ranked through a unique BlockRank algorithm to determine the working set of data that is necessary for every day operations, while automatically moving less used data, which can make up nearly 75 per cent of a business’ data, to the cloud. This gives enterprises the best-of-both worlds – SSD performance and the elasticity of the cloud.”
By keeping frequently accessed data on premise, application performance remains high and data is kept within company security protocols. Applications using the StorSimple appliance reap the performance and security benefits of keeping applications and working set data on premise, while shifting the burden of less frequently accessed content storage to the cloud. This has a major impact on performance both for regular application workloads and also backup and recovery as only the working set has to be moved to the cloud.
StorSimple is also taking cloud storage one step further with an application-optimisation plug-in architecture. This maximises the performance of each volume of an application knowing whether to store the data on SSD, SAS drive or the cloud with a unique application-specific BlockRank algorithm. For example, with SharePoint, the database is always stored on SSD whereas the content, including large objects like audio, video and CAD drawings, can be spread over SSD, SAS drive or the cloud. This application plug-in extends to Microsoft VSS consistent application backup and restore.
“We’re using StorSimple for backup and recovery, Microsoft Exchange archiving and migrating file share data to SharePoint 2010,” said Ryan Dengate, IT manager for Pine Rest Health Services. “As its name implies, StorSimple takes the first step of BLOB externalisation and marries it to backup really easily. It took very little time to get up and running and creating business use cases.”
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