Microsoft has provided several ways to back up data to Azure, including Data Protection Manager (DPM) part of System Center, Windows Backup, direct tools like PowerShell, Azure Backup, and to a certain extent StorSimple. They have evolved quickly over the past few years in terms of features and capabilities/limitations.

Azure provides an attractive option for data backup for several reasons, including:

    • Vast capacity (Petabytes). A single Azure subscription can have 100 Storage Accounts, each has 500 TB capacity
    • Low cost. For backup, people typically use Cool (99% SLA, $0.2/10k transactions) GRS Block Blob storage. That’s $408/TB/Year.
    • Fast backup/recovery. Clients can connect to Azure securely over the Internet, or use multi Gbps direct connection via Azure Express Route.

      Azure-Express-Route-provides-fast-backup-and-recovery-to-and-from-Azure-storage

      Azure Express Route provides fast backup and recovery to and from Azure storage

  • Quickly add or lower capacity. Pay only for what you use. This is a great benefit compared to on-premises SAN storage, where it takes several months to engineer and procure, requires significant capital expense, and cannot be reduced.
  • Backup and Disaster Recovery. Being off-site, backing up data to Azure provides DR as well.
  • Geo-redundancy. Data is automatically and asynchronously replicated to another Azure data center 400 miles away or more at no additional cost (part of GRS cost)

From the client’s prospective, a backup solution needs to meet the following features/capabilities:

  • Provide multiple recovery points
  • Provide adequate RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) to meet the workload SLA (Service Level Agreement)
  • Granular recovery – item level recovery such as individual files, mailboxes, database transactions, …
  • Self-service recovery – usually optional, and varies depending on the workload. For example, a typical organization may want to give end users self-service recovery for files in home folders but not enterprise-wide databases.
  • Be secure – at rest and in transit encryption
  • Efficient use of storage – deduplication and compression
  • Have a number of off-site recovery points (Disaster Recovery)
  • Geo-redundancy. This refers to having a copy of every off-site recovery point at a different off-site location that’s geographically distant from the primary off-site backup location.

Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) is the latest evolution of Microsoft Backup solutions to Azure. Microsoft has announced recently MABS support for on-premises VMWare VM to on-premises and Azure storage. We will explore different solutions to backup data to Azure in future articles, examining their advantages, disadvantages, cost-effectiveness, and suitability for different workloads and different client/data sizes.

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