Just as the Internet has fundamentally changed many industries, cloud computing is fundamentally changing the information technology industry, including infrastructures such as enterprise data storage. This book is about one of the new infrastructure game changers—a storage architecture called hybrid cloud storage that was developed by a company called StorSimple, now a part of Microsoft, as a way to integrate cloud storage services with traditional enterprise storage. Hybrid cloud storage is a completely different approach to storing data with a single comprehensive management system covering data through its entire life cycle, including active and inactive states as well as backup and archive versions. IT teams with cloud-integrated storage arrays running in their data centers use cloud storage as a data management tool and not simply as additional storage capacity that needs to be managed. That concept takes a little time to fully understand and it’s why this book was written.

 

The audience for this book includes all levels of IT professionals, from executives responsible for determining IT strategies to systems administrators who manage systems and storage. The book explains how hybrid cloud storage changes the ways data protection is accomplished without tape backup systems; how disaster recovery works with data that is stored in the cloud; how cloud services are used to facilitate capacity management; and how the performance of data stored in the cloud is managed. Several applications for hybrid cloud storage are discussed to help IT professionals determine how they can use the Microsoft hybrid cloud storage (HCS) solution to solve their own storage problems. The last chapter is a hypothetical look into the future that speculates how this technology might evolve.