We're excited to announce the availability of locally pinned volumes for the Microsoft Azure StorSimple 8000 Series. Locally pinned volumes are fully provisioned volumes that do not tier data to the cloud, thereby ensuring local guarantees for primary data, independent of cloud connectivity.

With the availability of pinned volumes, you can now host workloads such as SQL and Virtual Machines which are sensitive to cloud latencies, while continuing to reap the benefits of the cloud for backups and location independent disaster recovery. Locally pinned volumes in tandem with existing tiered volumes will enable you to host multiple workloads on your StorSimple device – those requiring the performance of locally available data or the scale of the cloud or a combination of the two.

Locally pinned volumes are available with StorSimple 8000 Series Update 2 or higher.

A few technical details:

• Because locally pinned volumes are fully provisioned, some existing data from tiered volumes might be pushed to the cloud during the provisioning process.
• Data stored in locally pinned volumes is not de-duplicated and compressed. However, snapshots of locally pinned volumes are de-duplicated.
• The maximum provisioned capacity for locally pinned volumes is 8.5 and 22.5 TB on the 8100/8600.
• Tiered volumes can be converted to a locally pinned volumes and vice versa.
• In case of DR, we support “instant” restores for locally pinned volumes, but the local guarantee won't be present until all the data has been downloaded from the cloud.

How to get started

You can create and manage locally pinned volumes in the same way as you manage existing tiered volumes – from the StorSimple Manager in Azure.  More information on locally pinned volumes and their management can be found on the product documentation on Managing StorSimple Volumes.

To learn about what's new in the StorSimple 8000 Series Update 2, please refer to the release notes.