Recently at the BizTalk Summit in London I was asked a question about Message Archiving from BizTalk and one of the most common solutions to this is the Message Archiving Pipeline Component which was written by my old friend Nick Heppleson.
After the summit I was pondering this archiving feature and wish that at the time I had mentioned Storsimple. Recently Id been speaking with Michael Royster from Microsoft in the UK and he had been telling me about the new acqusition Microsoft had made and how this solution combines on-premise storage with storage in Windows Azure which offers lots of opportunities.
The key thing here is that Storsimple is an appliance which you add to your data centre which offers up file storage but only certain data is kept on premise and the rest is kept in the cloud. The appliance handles the magic underneath that but your applications just see file shares on the network which they can communicate with.
Coming back to the archiving requirement if you have a customer who needs to archive a lot of messages and your worried about house keeping around this then you should certainly consider combining Message Archive Pipeline Component plus StorSimple to provide and excellent combined solution to this problem.
There is obviously a cost for StorSimple but you can reuse the applicance across other applications and use if for storage to help sharepoint and exchange implementations too or possibly back up archiving.
Anyway just a few thoughts that were lingering around my head on the train ride home last week. Heres some links if your interested:
http://www.storsimple.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008345