Amping up your disaster recovery with Azure Site Recovery
If you are in the process of building or revising your business continuity plans, it’s worth taking a look at Azure Site Recovery (ASR). ASR is a disaster recovery service that allows you to failover on-premises applications running on Linux and Windows and using VMware and Hyper-V to Azure in the event of an outage. Today’s episode of Microsoft Mechanics walks you through how Azure Site Recovery can help you to keep your applications available, including setting up replication for your on-premises applications to Azure and testing that the solution meets your compliance needs. Read more about it in the Azure blog.Azure Site Recovery now supports managed disks
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now supports managed disks. This follows the announcement of Azure's support for managed disks in February. With the integration of managed disks into ASR, you can attach managed disks to your machines during a failover or migration to Azure. Managed disks provide the following advantages: Simplified disk management for Azure IaaS VMs by removing the hassle of managing storage accounts for your machines after failover to Azure. Improved reliability for Availability Sets by ensuring that the disks of the failed over VMs are automatically placed in different storage scale units (stamps) to avoid single points of failure. Read about it on the Azure blog.Upgrade classic Backup and Site Recovery vaults to ARM Recovery Services vaults
Today, we are pleased to offer seamless upgrade of classic Backup or Site Recovery vaults to ARM based Recovery Services vaults. Last May 2016, we announced the General Availability of Recovery Services (RS) vault based on the Azure Resource Manager for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. Since then, we announced many new features for both services which are available only with Recovery Services vaults. The new upgrade feature allows customers on the older classic vaults of both Backup and ASR to seamlessly upgrade to RS vault with minimal downtime, no loss of data, recovery points or configuration settings, and take advantage of all the new features available with RS vaults. Read about it on the Azure blog.Cloud migration and disaster recovery of load balanced multi-tier applications
Support for Microsoft Azure virtual machines availability sets has been a highly anticipated capability by many Azure Site Recovery customers who are using the product for either cloud migration or disaster recovery of applications. Today, I am excited to announce that Azure Site Recovery now supports creating failed over virtual machines in an availability set. This in turn allows that you can configure an internal or external load balancer to distribute traffic between multiple virtual machines of the same tier of an application. With the Azure Site Recovery promise of cloud migration and disaster recovery of applications, this first-class integration with availability sets and load balancers makes it simpler for you to run your failed over applications on Microsoft Azure with the same guarantees that you had while running them on the primary site. We look at how to failover or migrate a load balanced multi-tier application using Azure Site Recovery. Read about it in the Azure blog.Introducing Backup Pre-Checks for Backup of Azure VMs
Azure Backup's cloud-first approach Aof backing up critical enterprise data in Azure. Enterprise production environments in Azure are becoming increasingly dynamic and are characterized by frequent VM configuration changes (such as network or platform related updates) that can adversely impact backup. Today, we are taking a step to enable customers to monitor the impact of configuration changes and take steps to ensure the continuity of successful backup operations. We are excited to announce the preview of Backup Pre-Checks for Azure Virtual Machines. Backup Pre-Checks, as the name suggests, check your VMs’ configuration for issues that can adversely affect backups, aggregate this information so you can view it directly from the Recovery Services Vault dashboard and provide recommendations for corrective measures to ensure successful file-consistent or application-consistent backups, wherever applicable. All this without any infrastructure and at no additional cost. Read more on the Azure blog.Azure Site Recovery now available in five new regions
To increase our service global footprint, we recently announced the expansion of Azure Site Recovery to Canada and UK regions. Apart from these two new countries, we have also deployed our service in West US2, making it available to all non-government Azure regions in the United States. With this expansion, Azure Site Recovery is now available in 27 regions worldwide including Australia East, Australia Southeast, Brazil South, Central US, East Asia, East US, East US2, Japan East, Japan West, North Europe, North Central US, Southeast Asia, South Central US, West Central US, West US2, US Gov Virginia, US Gov Iowa, West Europe, West US, North East China, East China, South India,Central India, UK South, UK West, Canada East, and Canada Central. Read about it on the Azure blog.Microsoft creates industry standards for datacenter hardware storage and security
Today we are announcing a next-generation specification for solid state device (SSD) storage, Project Denali. We’re also discussing Project Cerberus, which provides a critical component for security protection that to date has been missing from server hardware: protection, detection and recovery from attacks on platform firmware. Both storage and security are the next frontiers for hardware innovation, and today we’re highlighting the latest advancements across these key focus areas to further the industry in enabling the future of the cloud. Storage paradigms have performed well on-premises, but they haven’t resulted in innovation for increasing performance and cost efficiencies needed for cloud-based models. For this reason, we’re setting out to define a new standard for flash storage specifically targeted for cloud-based workloads and I’m excited to reveal Project Denali, which we’re establishing with CNEX Labs. Fundamentally, Project Denali standardizes the SSD firmware interfaces by disaggregating the functionality for software-defined data layout and media management. With Project Denali, customers can achieve greater levels of performance, while leveraging the cost-reduction economics that come at cloud scale. Read about it in the Azure blog.Announcing general availability of large disk VM backup support
Today we are excited to announce general availability of large disk VM backup support and a set of restore and backup performance improvements through new VM backup stack. Learn more @ https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/large-disk-support/Introducing backup for Azure file shares
Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of backup for Azure file shares. Azure Files is a cloud-first file share solution with support for industry standard SMB protocol. Through this preview, Azure Backup enables a native backup solution for Azure file shares, a key addition to the feature arsenal to enable enterprise adoption of Azure Files. Using Azure Backup, via Recovery Services vault, to protect your file shares is a straightforward way to secure your files and be assured that you can go back in time instantly. Read about it in the Azure blog.
