[http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/recovery-services/ configure-a-](http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/recovery-services/ configure-a-)
backup-vault/
My goal is to ensure that you know about the capability, because it’s an easy way to
get offsite backups and architect a backup solution whereby a certain number of days’
backups are kept onsite and then an additional duration is kept in the public cloud.
Using Microsoft Azure Storage for backups is a great use case. Nonetheless, if things
go well, you will never use it, and it’s not helping solve organizations’ number 1 pain
point regarding data, namely, that there is too much of it and it’s getting harder and
harder to store and manage it. Figure 12.14 shows a typical organization’s amount of
data over time, and as you can see, it is exponentially increasing. However, also notice
that the actual working set of data that is used is much smaller and grows much more
slowly.
Figure 12.14 Typical organizational data volume over time
Microsoft acquired StorSimple, which is a storage appliance that has a certain amount
of local storage, both HDD and SSD, but it can also leverage Microsoft Azure Storage.
The StorSimple appliance acts as an iSCSI target and then at a block level leverages
tiers of storage, including using deduplication and compression to store the data. The
more frequently accessed data will be stored on a higher tier; for example, the most-
used data will be stored in the SSD tier, less-used data would be stored in the HDD
tier, while rarely used data will be stored in Microsoft Azure Storage. This reorganizing
of data happens automatically by using algorithms built into StorSimple. All of the
data that exists, but that is rarely used, would be uploaded to Microsoft Azure Storage
and then deleted from the local storage, keeping the most-used data local (as well as
storing it in Microsoft Azure for protection), which gives the highest performance
while providing essentially an infinite total capacity size. To the end user, all of the