We are pleased to announce that StorSimple supports Azure Blob storage accounts. StorSimple 8000 Series Storage Arrays, StorSimple Cloud Appliances and the StorSimple Virtual Array all have full support for both the hot and cool access tiers provided by Blob storage accounts.

Blob storage accounts are specialized storage accounts for storing your unstructured data as blobs (objects) in Azure Storage. With Blob storage accounts, you can now choose between hot and cool storage access tiers. And you can switch between hot and cool access tiers any time with a quick toggle from the Azure portal. The latency for Blob storage accounts (hot and cool) is in the milliseconds and the scalability and performance targets are the same as general-purpose storage accounts. Read more details in the Azure Blob storage documentation.

Azure Blob storage accounts can be used just like general purpose storage accounts within StorSimple. When you configure a StorSimple volume container to use a Blob storage account, all cloud tiered data and cloud snapshot data will go to that storage account.

Within the same StorSimple appliance, you can mix different types of storage accounts. Each volume container is configured with one storage account. If you have one volume that has more frequent access, you can use hot storage for it and cool storage for volumes with less frequently accessed data. Azure cool storage tier is a great fit for many StorSimple scenarios. In general, any data that is seldom accessed is a good candidate for cool storage tier.

Migration of StorSimple data from a general purpose storage account to a Blob storage account is not supported at this time, but we are examining adding this for the future. If you are an existing customer who would like to migrate, please contact me at memard@microsoft.com. 

Best practices for using the Azure Blob storage accounts with StorSimple:

• Initially set the access tier to hot. Keep the access tier set to hot until any initial data migrations are complete and the account has a significant amount of infrequently accessed data. Then consider switching to cool.
• Evaluate your existing usage pattern to determine whether you will benefit from using a cool storage account. To learn how Azure Storage metrics can help you to understand your storage usage pattern, click here.
• Consider configuring your StorSimple volume to use 512K chunk sizes. StorSimple uses 64K chunks of data by default. Doing this reduces the number of transactions and transaction fees you will incur at the possible expense of lower deduplication. To do this check the box for “less frequently accessed archival data” when creating a volume.
• Scenarios that involve a lot of cloud data access, such as using the StorSimple Cloud Appliance for dev/test or research, are better suited for hot storage.
• If you expect to clone data often you should choose hot storage.

To configure a StorSimple appliance with cool Blob storage:

1. Create a Blob storage account.
2. Configure your storage account with StorSimple.

For pricing information, please contact our sales team: storagesales@microsoft.com