Cloud design point for backup

Most backup products have evolved their cloud strategy by treating the cloud as just another storage medium, like tape or disk, for the backup data. Furthermore, for all experiences on the data protected in the cloud, either the data needs to be restored back to the on-premises datacenter or customers need to run the backup software in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) virtual machine (VM) in the cloud to deliver the experiences. While this has some advantages in terms of simplicity and ease of deployment, it has cost implications and is a limited-use case for the ultimate value that the public cloud offers.

Microsoft has taken a different approach by building a multi-tenanted PaaS backup service in Microsoft Azure called Azure Backup, which integrates seamlessly with the on-premises DPM backup product to provide an end-to-end solution optimized for the cloud. This approach leverages elastic storage in Azure as well as on-demand compute services to build rich backup experiences in a very economical, pay-as-you-go model. Advantages include:

 Anywhere, anytime access for managing and monitoring backups and self-service restores

 Efficient cloud storage architecture that provides low-cost, resilient data storage

 On-demand scaling up or down depending of ingestion of data

 Rich data services in Azure, like item-level restores and testing backups

 Consistent way to back up on-premises, hybrid, and IaaS/PaaS deployments

DPM is recognized in the industry as a best-in-class enterprise backup, and together with Azure Backup, it provides a compelling hybrid cloud backup solution for three key classes of data:

 Enterprise client protection (PCs and desktops).

 Host-level VM backups for Microsoft Hyper-V, more popularly known in the backup domain as “agentless virtual machine backups.”

 Workload-aware backup for Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, and Microsoft Exchange Server. These workloads typically run on a physical server, but they could also be running on a guest operating system in a Hyper-V VM, VMware VM, or Azure IaaS VM.

The DPM roadmap also includes support for host-level VMware VM backup, to have parity with the backup that is supported for Hyper-V VMs. Future workloads that will be supported are Oracle and IBM DB2, both running on Linux. The goal is to diversify and become a truly heterogeneous enterprise backup solution.

Subsequent sections will describe features in Azure Backup and DPM, specifically:

 Overview of Azure Backup PaaS service

 Workload (SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server) and Enterprise Client backup

 Enhancements to support Hyper-V VM backup at Cloud Platform System (CPS) scale

 De-duplication support using Windows De-Duplication capability

 Integration with System Center

Source of Information : Microsoft System Center