Choosing right storage solution

Author: alkohli

articles/storsimple/storsimple-8000-choose-storage-solution.md

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+---
+title: Choose Azure storage solutions | Microsoft Docs
+description: Learn how to choose the right Azure storage solution for your needs
+services: storsimple
+author: alkohli
+
+ms.service: storsimple
+ms.topic: article
+ms.date: 10/25/2018
+ms.author: alkohli
+---
+
+# Choosing the right Azure Storage on-premises solution 
+ 
+This document provides an overview of the on-premises Azure Storage solutions, comparing: Data Box Edge vs Azure File Sync (AFS) vs StorSimple 8000 series.
+
+- **[Data Box Edge](data-box-edge-overview.md)** – Data Box Edge is an on-premises network device that moves data into and out of Azure and has AI-enabled edge compute to pre-process data during upload. It was announced at Ignite 2018 and is in public preview. Data Box Gateway is a virtual version of the device with the same data transfer capabilities.
+- **[Azure File Sync](/azure/storage/files/storage-sync-files-deployment-guide)** – Azure File Sync can be used to centralize your organization's file shares in Azure Files, while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of an on-premises file server. Azure File Sync transforms Windows Server into a quick cache of your Azure file share. General availability of AFS was announced earlier in 2018.
+- **[StorSimple](/azure/storsimple/storsimple-overview)** – StorSimple is a hybrid device that helps enterprises consolidate their storage infrastructure for primary storage, data protection, archiving and disaster recovery on a single solution by tightly integrating with Azure storage. The product lifecycle for StorSimple can be found [here](https://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search?alpha=Azure%20StorSimple%208000%20Series).
+
+# Solution comparison
+
+|                           |StorSimple 8000   |Azure File Sync   |Data Box Edge (Preview)                |
+|---------------------------|----------------------------------------|-------------------------------|-----------------------------------------|
+|Overview         |Tiered hybrid storage and archival|General file server storage with cloud tiering and multi-site sync.  |Storage solution to pre-process data and send it over network to Azure.        |
+|Scenarios        |File server, archival, backup target |File server, archival (multi-site)   |Data transfer, data pre-processing including ML inferencing, IoT, archival    |
+|Edge compute     |Not available |Not available |Supports running containers using Azure IoT Edge    |
+|Form factor      |Physical device   |Agent installed on Windows Server |Physical device   |
+|Hardware         |Physical device provided from Microsoft as part of the service | Customer provided |Physical device provided from Microsoft as part of the service  |
+|Data format      |Custom format   |Files         |Blobs or Files    |
+|Protocol support |iSCSI          |SMB, NFS    | SMB or NFS      |
+|Pricing          |[StorSimple pricing](https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/storsimple/) |[AFS pricing](https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/storage/files/)  |[Data Box Edge pricing](https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/storage/databox/edge/)  |
+