All Microsoft workloads that can be protected by Data Protection Manager (DPM) on disk or tape can also be protected to Azure Backup . At a high level, table below describes granularity at which DPM can protect various Microsoft workloads to Azure. It also describes granularity at which DPM can perform recovery from Azure.
|
Microsoft Workload |
DPM Protection Granularity |
DPM Recovery Granularity |
Original Location Recovery (OLR) |
Alternate Location Recovery (ALR) |
Network Location Recovery |
|
File Folder on Windows Server |
Folder |
Folder, Item |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Hyper-V VMs |
VM |
VM |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
SharePoint Farm |
Farm |
Farm, SharePoint DB |
Yes |
Yes for DB |
Yes |
|
SQL |
SQL Instance, SQL DB |
SQL DB |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Exchange |
Exchange |
Exchange DB |
Yes |
Yes (Exchange 2010+ Only) |
Yes |
|
Windows Client |
Volume, Folder |
Folder, Item |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Why choose DPM for Long Term Retention of Microsoft Workloads to Azure?
Data resiliency is an important Enterprise strategy as compliance requires point in time data to be reproduced. Long term retention of data is an obvious outcome to meet compliance requirement. Data growth rate coupled with pressure on IT spending demands competitive total cost of ownership (TCO) for backup data.
Azure offers a competitive cost savings in comparison with tape. Gartner released a report (G00261961 – How to Determine If Cloud Backup Is Right for Your Servers, Published: 13 February 2014) which reported TCO of cloud backups significantly lower than tape-based back-up – “ Although tape media is very inexpensive, a majority of the cost of tape-based backup is the “soft” costs, which occur around backup software, maintenance and staff time ”.
As rightly called in the Gartner’s report “Is Cloud Backup Right for Your Servers?” backup window, restore time, bandwidth and latency play an important role in evaluating cloud backup strategy.
For Initial Replica, DPM provides capability to offline send the data to Azure which not only improves backup seeding time but also saves on network bandwidth. For more details on how to send Initial Replica offline to Azure refer to this TechNet article
With DPM sending incrementals to Azure, backup window can be contained to non-productions hours without any significant addition to bandwidth costs. An example for 1 TB Microsoft workload is shared below –
|
Microsoft Protected Workload Size |
1 TB |
|
Daily Churn |
5% ~ 50GB |
|
Backup Window |
8 hrs. (Non-production hours) |
|
Compression |
30% |
|
Effective Bandwidth Required for Daily Backup (After latency and packet loss adjustments) |
~10 Mbps |
As DPM sends changed file contents efficiently to Azure, it significantly reduces storage and network costs .
Recommendation
Looking at the TCO benefits that DPM - Azure Backup brings and the fact that DPM sends forever incrementals to Azure as compared with fulls on tape; we recommend the following backup and retention schedule
|
Disk |
Daily incremental backup, retention for 7 days |
|
Azure |
Daily incremental backup, retention as per your industry compliance and company policies |
How to use DPM to protect Microsoft workloads to Azure?
Once a DPM user configures
Azure Backup with DPM
, Create Protection Group Wizard now shows option to backup to the Azure (as shown below)
Once the user selects online protection, retention ranges can be selected as described in the following blog .
For all Server and Client workloads, DPM continues to provide similar integrated user experience for protection to Azure. This simplifies the admin overhead as opposed to using native tools or different backup applications for different workloads
For more information on how to create/manage protection group using DPM, one can refer to the
TechNet article
.
Quick Reference
Download DPM UR5 and follow the
steps
outlined in the article for installation.
- Want to try out DPM Evaluation VHD ?
- Learn more about Azure Backup and System Center DPM .
- Click for a free Azure trial subscription , and download the latest Azure backup agent to get started!
- Need help? Reach out to the DPM forums and the Azure Backup forum for support.
- Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup : contribute new ideas and up-vote existing ones!