Archiving by using the Azure StorSimple appliance

Many businesses face situations in which they are required to retain large amounts of data for long
periods of time, often with the expectation that this data will rarely or never be accessed. One way to
accomplish this is through the use of a custom on-premises storage appliance designed to
communicate with the cloud.

The StorSimple storage appliance manages SharePoint, SQL Service, and ordinary file share data, and “ages” out infrequently accessed data to the Azure cloud in a highly efficient (encrypted, compressed) fashion.

In the preceding illustration, you can see the scenarios in which the StorSimple appliance is commonly
used. These include the following

 Archive

•  Archives and disaster recovery
• Dramatic cost reduction
•  No changes to application environment

 File shares

• File share with integrated data protection
• All-in-one primary data + backup + live archives + disaster recovery with deduplication and compression

 SharePoint

• SharePoint storage on StorSimple and Azure
• StorSimple SharePoint Database Optimizer
• Improved performance and scalability

 SQL Server

• Storage for Tier 3 – 3 SQL databases
• Integrated backup, restore, and disaster recovery

 Virtual environments

• Control virtual sprawl
• Cloud-as-a-tier
• Offload storage footprint
• VMware Storage DRS Storage pools
• Virtual Machine Archive
• Regional VM Storage

The benefits of using a storage appliance that takes advantage of the Azure platform are the consolidation of primary storage with archive, backup, disaster recovery through seamless integration

with Azure, cloud snapshots, deduplication, compression, and encryption. Together, these benefits

result in an average reduction of enterprise storage total cost of ownership (TCO) of 60 to 80 percent.

Design considerations

When planning an Azure archiving deployment using the StorSimple appliance, consider the

following:

 What types of data do you want to save in the cloud using StorSimple? For example, you might choose to use Azure Backup for transactional SQL data if it is highly unlikely that your users will be querying days-old data. Alternatively, you might use StorSimple for data in SharePoint that is only occasionally referenced but needs to be accessible in real time.

 Consider StorSimple for data with legal retention requirements; for example, you must keep the data available for long periods of time.

Source of Information : Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Strategy