IT Pro Start-Up Tour: StorSimple

Who are they?

StorSimple is a true Silicon Valley start-up: a young, small team who are really excited about their idea and vision for the future.

The name says it all well almost. StorSimple's aim is to make managing storage, both on premise and in the cloud, as straightforward as possible.

Its ethos is built on simple deployment, reducing the amount of kit used within a company's data centre and ensuring backup really does mean "back up", even when disaster strikes.

The range of products is simple enough too just two storage appliances, the 5010 and the 7010, with the latter offering double the storage capacity at 200TB.

Why should you care?

StorSimple is offering an exciting product that comes at an affordable price, especially when compared to full-on arrays from storage giants.

Effectively, the company's appliances bring together primary storage, archiving, data protection and disaster recovery in one piece of kit.

Deployment should be fairly straightforward for IT departments StorSimple claims its products can be installed in just 10 minutes with 10 simple steps.

StorSimple claims its products can be installed in just 10 minutes with 10 simple steps

What's more, the applications hook up to the cloud, metaphorically punching a hole through the data centre wall so companies can enjoy the backup and disaster recovery benefits the cloud can offer.

StorSimple claims the self-explanatory Cloud Clone offering effectively replaces the need for tape backup, while Cloud Snapshot replication duplicates storage for disaster recovery via the cloud.

The tiering system in the appliances determines what is "hot" data (that which a company uses heavily at any given time) and what is "cold" (that which is stored by the company but which is effectively redundant). The "hot" data is delivered via SSD drives for high speed.

The whole process is based on what StorSimple calls the BlockRank algorithm, doing for blocks of content what PageRank does for Google.

To boost speed further, the products perform deduplication and WAN optimisation when sending data out to the cloud. IT departments will also find SAS storage on the appliances.

As you can see, the appliances do a lot in one box. Microsoft certainly thinks StorSimple is one to watch, naming it the BizSpark Partner of the Year. Gartner named the company one of its "cool vendors."