Microsoft has stopped being just an operating system company a long time ago, adding a considerable number of notches to its belt of titles over the years: server virtualization vendor, cloud service provider, tablet maker and most recently enterprise storage supplier with the acquisition of StorSimple in November 2012.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, set the industry abuzz with speculations that the Redmond giant may look to leverage the startup’s technology as a means of linking the largely disparate on- and off-premise components of its portfolio. StorSimple was shaping up to be a perfect fit for the task.

The venture-backed startup developed a line of block-based appliances that counts as hybrid in every sense of the word: The StorSimple series not only combines traditional-disk with solid-state memory but also provides a built-in cloud uplink that allows users to keep a copy or a portion of their files off-site with a minimal amount of fiddling. That functionality can be useful both for data protecting and offloading sudden usage spikes that would be much costlier to address internally. Yet despite the tremendous strategic potential, Microsoft didn’t release so much as a single significant product update in the two years following the buyout.

That is, until this week. Takeshi Numoto, the software titan’s head of cloud and enterprise marketing, chose a blog to reveal the introduction of two new additions to the StorSimple family that hook up to its Azure platform-as-a-service platform. The timing of the announcement is somewhat unexpected, but comes as much less of a surprise in the context of the new rumors about Microsoft reviving its plans for Azure-based private cloud appliances as part of a renewed hybrid computing drive under CEO and theCUBE alumnus Satya Nadella.

The new StorSimple machines represent the spearhead of that push. Set to hit general availability at the beginning of August, the systems are meant to make it easier for organizations to handle the rapid growth of their in-house data reservoirs.

The StorSimple 8100, one of the two models that will launch next month, packs 12 terabytes of usable disk space and another 800 gigabytes worth of speedy eMLC flash in a 2U rackmount box. In practice, it can accommodate as much as 75 terabytes locally thanks to built-in compression and inline deduplication, plus another 125 terabytes leveraging Azure blob storage.

The same advanced data services ship with the StorSimple 8600, which comes in at twice the size of its smaller sibling and sports 40 terabytes of usable local disk capacity as well as a cool two terabytes of solid-state memory. Overall, it can handle up to 200 terabytes of data internally and allows users to store another 500 terabytes in Microsoft’s public cloud.

Complementing the new systems is the  Azure StorSimple Virtual Appliance, a managed implementation of the series running on Azure that can be managed side-by-side with on-premise deployments through Azure StorSimple Manager, yet another fresh addition to Redmond’s enterprise portfolio. But, Numoto stressed in his blog, the service works with Linux and VMware environments too. It’s designed for the same workloads the arrays are: data protection and cloud offloading, a broad use cases that covers everything from test and development to data analytics.

Microsoft claims that these latest enhancements to the StorSimple family can help customers reduce storage costs by between 40 and 60 percent while greatly simplifying management. Percentages aside, however, the roll out adds a significant hybrid element to Azure that puts it in a better position to compete against AWS and Google’s CGI as enterprises look for ways to link their private and public clouds. Yet at the same time, it opens a front against key hardware partners such as EMC, which also entered into the cloud tiering fray this week with the acquisition of TwinStrata.

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