Announcing general availability of the StorSimple Virtual Array

Today I am pleased to announce general availability of the on-premises StorSimple Virtual Array, for all customers with an Enterprise Agreement for Microsoft Azure. We will be rolling out the virtual array to all regions in coming weeks.

StorSimple Virtual Array is a version of the solution available in a virtual machine form installed on your existing hypervisors. The virtual array is built on the success of previous StorSimple technology using a hybrid cloud storage approach for on-demand capacity scaling in the cloud and cloud-based data protection and disaster recovery.

The virtual array can be run as a virtual machine on your Hyper-V or VMware ESXi hypervisors and can be configured as a File Server (NAS) or as an iSCSI server (SAN). The hybrid approach stores the most used data (hottest) local on the virtual array and (optionally) tiers older stale data to Azure. The virtual array also provides the ability to back up the data to Azure (offsite) and enables a quick disaster recovery (DR) capability.

Each virtual array can manage up to 64 TB of data in the cloud. Virtual arrays, in different branch and remote offices across geographies, can be managed from a central StorSimple management portal in Azure.

Recommended workloads/scenarios

¹If you want to use features such as quota management, file screening etc. to manage home folders, you can connect a windows file server via iSCSI.

How to get started

1. Navigate to the Azure portal.
2. Click New.
3. Select Data Services –> StorSimple Manager –> Quick Create.
4. Provide a Name, then select Virtual Device Series under Managed Devices Type and Location for the StorSimple manager.

Minimum configuration

More detailed instructions for getting started, using the virtual appliance and managing it, are available on the StorSimple documentation page.