VMware has rapidly become the predominant platform for data centers, providing a flexible resource-efficient architecture for computing. VMware fundamentally transforms physical computing resources into logical resources supporting dynamic allocation with migration of workloads across systems along with a host of other capabilities. However, like deployments of physical computing infrastructure, virtual computing infrastructure demands a significant amount of storage across a variety of different classes and categories of devices. With VMware, organizations may encounter the following challenges: 

• Massive storage growth – storage requirements for virtual machines (VMs) and user data grow at unprecedented rates
• Complex remote office infrastructure – deploying VMs in remote offices drives additional infrastructure for managing the lifecycle of VM and remote office data
• Uncontrollable VM proliferation – the number of VMs being deployed continues to increase, and most are never decommissioned, creating an archival storage challenge
• Challenging data protection deployments – managing VM data through its lifecycle requires multiple disparate technologies, products, and management dashboards, driving up cost and complexity

This whitepaper covers the StorSimple approach to:

• Simple, cost-effective elastic capacity using the cloud – intelligently leverage cloud storage for primary, archival, backup, remote office, data protection, and disaster recovery
• Simple remote office infrastructure with lower cost and footprint – simple all-in-one storage solution for remote office VMs and data, eliminating numerous costly and complex components
• Simple VM archiving – leverage the cloud to automatically archive older VMs to the cloud with “always- on” access when they need to be recalled
• Simple data protection and disaster recovery – self-protecting storage automatically backs up VM datastores and data locally and to the cloud, enabling disaster recovery deployments globally