Starting up my Azure VM remotely

Other than using the web based dashboard is there a way to remotely start up my VM instance?

I am trying azure out as a backup service for my websites and I don't need it running all day. I just need to be able to write a script that runs on Linux servers to do the following.

The workflow of the script is:

1. start up VM instance
2. FTP in
3. Retrieve the file with checksums of tar.gz file
   
4. If different, upload the new compressed file
5. Upload the checksum file
6. Shut down instance

2-6 is trivial but is 1 possible?

Or is there a different Azure service I could use from Linux based servers?