Posted by Ursheet Parikh on Wed, Jan 25, 2012 @ 04:45 PM
It’s been exciting to watch the news and buzz surrounding Amazon’s release of their AWS Storage Gateway today. Sweeping industry changes start with an inflection point of some kind and Amazon’s announcement enables cloud integrated enterprise storage to become a mainstream architecture. While there have been a number of companies, including StorSimple, working to develop this technology, there’s nothing like having a company with a household name come out and endorse the ideas we’ve been working on.
So we welcome Amazon to the fray with open arms and open eyes knowing that change is going to come.
For many people reading this blog, StorSimple is not a household name (yet), so I’ll introduce you to us. We make storage systems that integrate our customers' data with cloud storage services from partners like Amazon, AT&T, Azure, HP, Rackspace and a growing list of others. Our customers use our systems today to vastly improve their restore capabilities and reduce the cost and footprint of their enterprise storage. For most of them, StorSimple products have been the easiest way to start using the cloud and generate the ROI that everybody likes talking about when they talk about cloud. We also cover the caveats that skeptics like to raise such as security, encryption, data integrity and data portability.
We are all about enterprise storage at StorSimple and our products are built to enterprise standards including redundant controllers for high availability and SSDs for high performance. Our software is also enterprise-ready including data management features such as deduplication, cloud thin provisioning, local and cloud snapshots, clones and cloud data tiering. You can reach more about customer cloud success stories on our website.
Who knows what will happen in the future, but at StorSimple we believe cloud-integrated enterprise storage will be part and parcel of most organization’s infrastructures. So thanks Amazon for throwing the big switch and turning the spotlight on.
Posted by Rick Freedman on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 @ 11:03 AM
Sundance Institute was in need of more storage capacity and the IT team was challenged trying to keep up with backing up the existing storage. Compounding this was the annual Sundance Film Festival during which the staff doubles, storage needs become much greater, and festival logistics ramp-up to support the 40,000 attendees.
Justin Simmons, Associate Director of Technology Services, wanted to find a solution providing on-premise storage, de-duplication to reduce their total capacity requirements and using cloud storage – to provide the scale to support peak demands as well as lower storage costs. When Justin found that StorSimple could provide all of these capabilities in one box, he knew that it would be an ideal solution and a huge timesaver.
“We no longer need to do backups now that it all backs up straight to the cloud,” said Justin. “And, we freed up a lot of storage in the datacenter by moving the archives to the cloud as well.” In addition, Sundance Institute had previously relied on disk-to-disk backups, with no off-site storage. Now the cloud provides a secure off-site storage and has eliminated the tedious efforts required for the disk-based backups.
To learn more about StorSimple at Sundance Institute and their experiences, please see the video at: http://youtu.be/lUCrCz-nIOU or the full case study at: http://www.storsimple.com/testimonials/sundance-institute/
Posted by Rick Freedman on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 @ 11:03 AM
StorSimple is pleased to be a corporate sponsor of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival which opens this week. Through year-round programs, Sundance Institute seeks to discover and develop independent artists and audiences and to provide a platform for artists to present their works to a global audience—the Sundance Film Festival. Our sponsorship represents the partnership with the Sundance Institute to use cloud computing to support the increasing vitality of independent film and filmmakers while expanding audiences.
To learn more about StorSimple at Sundance Institute and their experiences, please see the video at: http://youtu.be/lUCrCz-nIOU or the full case study at: http://www.storsimple.com/testimonials/sundance-institute/
Posted by Rick Freedman on Thu, Jan 05, 2012 @ 05:23 PM
BMC, a $2 billion software company, maintains over 13,000 VMware images and templates and that number continues to grow. The majority of these VMs don’t need to be on expensive storage but they all need to be online. The sheer volume of VMs makes backups challenging. In addition, their existing data center was reaching its limits in terms of power and cooling capacity.
Gus Chavira, Enterprise Architect at BMC, considered options such as purchasing additional SAN storage, storage tiering, or other archiving solutions, but each would have required more data center power and cooling capacity. Gus selected the Cloud Integrated Enterprise Storage solution from StorSimple, which is certified by both data center platforms he uses today - VMware and Microsoft. StorSimple allows BMC to maintain on-premise storage while automatically tiering large volumes of inactive data (and inactive VMs) to cloud storage - freeing up valuable datacenter resources and mitigating the need to build a new datacenter.
“We initially looked at StorSimple for archiving, but realized that we got backup and disaster recovery built into the single appliance”, stated Gus. The solution eliminated his concerns about fitting in available backup windows and provides almost instant access to archived VM images (near-zero RTO)
To learn more about BMC Software’s deployment of StorSimple and their experiences, please see the case study at: http://www.storsimple.com/testimonials/bmc/
