We recently announced the availability of locally pinned volumes for the Microsoft Azure StorSimple 8000 series devices as part of StorSimple Update 2.

When you create a volume with this update, you can designate it as locally pinned. This ensures the primary data from the volume does not tier to the cloud, while continuing to leverage the cloud for backups and location independent disaster recovery. With the availability of locally pinned volumes you can now host workloads that are sensitive to cloud latencies and require local guarantees of data at all times.

Since locally pinned volumes are thickly provisioned, some existing data from tiered volumes might be pushed to the cloud during the provisioning process. Therefore, the time taken to create a locally pinned volume may be up to several hours and depends upon multiple factors such as the size of the volume you're provisioning, the data on your device and available bandwidth.

While considering usage of local volumes for any of your workloads, please be aware of the following:

• Locally pinned volumes are thickly provisioned and creating local volumes will impact the available space for tiered volumes. Therefore, we suggest you start with smaller sized volumes and scale up as your storage requirement increases.
• Provisioning of local volumes is a long running operation that might involve pushing existing data from tiered volumes to the cloud. As a result, you may experience reduced performance on these volumes.
• Provisioning of local volumes is a time consuming operation dependent on multiple factors: The size of the volume being provisioned, data on your device and available bandwidth. If you have not backed up your existing volumes to the cloud, then volume creation will be slower. We suggest you take cloud snapshots of your existing volumes before you provision a local volume.
• Finally, you can convert existing tiered volumes to local volumes. This conversion involves provisioning of space on the device for the resultant local volume (in addition to bringing down tiered data, if any, from the cloud). Again, this is a long running operation dependent on factors we’ve discussed above. In this case, we suggest you backup your existing volumes prior to conversion as the process will be further slow if existing volumes are not backed up. Your device might also experience reduced performance during this process.