Microsoft to Acquire Cloud Storage Company StorSimple

In a move aimed to advance its Cloud OS vision and help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing, technology giant Microsoft (News - Alert) Corp. announced it will acquire cloud integration storage company StorSimple Inc. Financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed.

With the explosive growth of data – and more companies looking to the cloud to help them manage that ever-growing data – Microsoft said its vision of a Cloud OS is aligned well with StorSimple’s storage integration approach, according to Michael Park, corporate vice president of the server and tools division for Microsoft.

“Customers faced with explosive growth in data are looking to the cloud to help them store, manage and archive that data. But, to be effective, cloud storage needs to integrate with IT’s current investments,” Park said in a company statement. “StorSimple’s approach helps customers seamlessly integrate on-premises storage with cloud storage through intelligent automation and management.”

In a video announcement, Ursheet Parikh, co-founder and CEO at StorSimple, spoke about the significance of Microsoft’s acquisition of the cloud-integrated storage solutions.

“Customers are finding that data is growing at increasing rates and they have a lot of investment. This is where what they are doing is they are using a cloud integrated storage solution like the one from StorSimple that actually combines the functions of primary backup, archiving and disaster recovery into a single-solution stack, that is seamlessly integrated with a cloud storage service like Windows Azure,” Parikh said.

StorSimple’s appliances became available about one year ago and in that time, Parikh said he has seen many mainstream enterprise IT customers choosing Windows Azure as their primary cloud to use with StorSimple.

“Part of the reason why we are so excited about this announcement is that it actually takes a product that was built here, and allows it to scale rapidly, globally and bring these benefits to many more customers,” Parikh added.

StorSimple uses encryption to protect data that’s sent over the Internet to cloud providers such as Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Rackspace (News - Alert). StorSimple automatically protects and rapidly restores production data using public clouds. Large enterprises across many vertical markets, including retail, oil and gas, manufacturing, consumer goods, healthcare, and financial services, have made their first public cloud deployments using StorSimple, company officials said.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company claims to reduce costs by up to 60 percent compared to traditional enterprise storage.

In August, StorSimple released results of data collected from production installations showing that a cloud-integrated storage approach to enterprise storage offers data de-duplication (de-dupe) ratios that average 3x to 5x for on-premise data and data in the cloud. The analysis of the data concluded that enterprises can reduce the total cost of storage by up to 60 percent by adopting cloud-integrated SANs compared to traditional premise-only SAN storage.