General availability: StorSimple 8000 Series Update 2

StorSimple 8000 Series Update 2 is a software-only update that is available via Microsoft Update and on shipping units. The update will be rolled out across geographies in stages. It includes two key enhancements that expand StorSimple’s use cases and workloads:

• Local volumes
• StorSimple Cloud Appliance 8020 (based on Azure Premium Storage)

Local volumes help ensure that primary data stays local to the device and does not tier to the cloud, so customers can run workloads that are sensitive to cloud latency, such as SQL and VMs. The new StorSimple Cloud Appliance is a software-only version of the StorSimple solution that runs on a VM in Azure. It offers increased capacity to 64 TB and increased performance by using Premium Storage as the local tier.In addition, customers can now help protect entire workloads hosted on StorSimple devices with Azure Site Recovery. Azure compute pricing is based on DS3 VM pricing, and disk pricing is based on Premium Storage disk pricing.For more information, please see the following blog post on TechNet: Microsoft targets new workloads and smaller enterprises with expanded StorSimple offerings.