Azure Backup – New Functionality

  • Article

Hello Folks,

imageWe’ve covered the “Backup” topic many times lately.

However, On February 16 we announced some improvements in the Azure Backup capabilities.  These improvements include Long term retention this could allow you to use the cloud as tape library replacement. Offline seeding will allow you to complete your initial seeding faster and off-the-network.  There are also new functionality in regards to DPM.  By the way,  I recommend the following MVA tracks if you are interested in the recovery options for Microsoft Azure.

In order to get the updated functionality you need to download the latest Azure Backup agent from KB3033794. By downloading this update you automatically get all the capabilities released in the last few months:

Long term retention

In my opinion the biggest gains are made in the fact that you can now can specify daily, weekly, monthly and yearly retention policies. You can now retain your data for up to 99 years in Azure.

If you are using tapes to address your long term retention needs – this release provides a compelling value prop to use Azure to address your backup and long term retention needs.

image

 

Offline seeding

Having discussed this with some IT pros, one comment that used to come up was, “my initial backup is too large, it takes too long to backup over my Internet connection”. Well this release addresses this by providing the capabilities to complete the initial backup by integrating with the Azure Import/Export service. That means that instead of doing the initial backup copy over your existing internet connection, You can ship the disk containing the initial backup copy to the nearest Azure datacenter

image

Things just keep getting better.

Cheers!

clip_image024

Pierre Roman | Technology Evangelist
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn