Session Highlight: Protecting VMware & Windows Using Azure

Aidan Finn from MicroWarehouse again! Backup is both one of the most important things that IT does, and one of the most annoying things that we must do in IT. Sit back and think for a minute – how many hours have you wasted fixing tape drives, cataloguing tapes for a restore, restoring a “job service”, explaining why a backup didn’t work to a boss/customer, or configuring emails to tell you when a backup has worked – a true sign that this is the exception instead of the norm!

Cloud backup is nothing new. It offers offsite storage, helps companies get closer to the 3-2-1 ideal, and can reduce long-term storage costs. Without a cloud service, you need to have a second location for off-site storage.
Traditionally, that meant paying for a tape storage service – a courier would collect your tapes (hopefully encrypted), drive at great speed over speed bumps and potholes, and deposit your (probably misaligned by now) tapes to some storage facility. If you wanted a restore, then the tapes had to be recalled (via the courier), catalogued, and a slow restore would begin. If you had a second location, then you could replicate the backup storage to there … but that increased the costs of storage.

And let’s not forget the companies where a receptionist would take the last backup (USB disk) home on the bus as “off-site storage”!

Back to the cost of storage – if you need to keep 1 year, 10 years, and even 99 years (some companies do!) of retention then keeping that data around is going to be expensive – at least with on-premises storage. I have a friend who has even talked about a previous employer that dumped the backup process because the cost of backup storage was higher than the cost of losing data!

The cloud, particularly Microsoft Azure, offers ultra-cheap storage, which is purchased and deployed in ways and scales that no one can match. The result is that Azure can provide the platform for cloud-based back that supports, obviously, the Microsoft stack, including Hyper-V, but can also protect VMware … yes, VMware!

Azure Backup has been a “first step” to the cloud for many businesses. The service has improved in many ways since I started working with Azure. I’ve found their team to be one of (if not the) very best at taking feedback and implementing it. Many of these improvements will be discussed in this session. This is a session that I would have normally done, but the Azure Backup team reached out to us and asked if they could take part in Cloud Camp. Of course we’d love them to join us! Kartik Pullabhotla, a Program Manager with the team, will be talking about how Azure Backup can be used to protect your on-premises IT investments, including VMware and Hyper-V. He’ll discuss some of the new developments with Windows Server 2019, Windows Admin Center, and I’m sure he’d like to talk about backup at scale too!

So come on – learn how to transform your backups from A**Serve and tapes like the dinosaurs used before they croaked, and join the rest of us in the 21st century by joining Kartik at this session at Cloud Camp 18.