Showing posts with label Backup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Backup. Show all posts
What exactly is Cloud Storage?
A good way to explain cloud storage is by comparing consumer vs commercial cloud storage. Most people these days are actively using and relying on cloud storage everyday through One Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox and the large number of other providers. Basically all these options are the same, store your media, images, files offsite in the cloud.
The commercial aspects of cloud storage are a bit more complex as you will need to identify your workload and requirements of it. As in blob storage is great for videos, images and media but that will not work with databases or application back end data. The various cloud suppliers have various tiers of cloud storage to help you identify your requirements. These can range from "hot" storage or frequently accessed data to "cold storage" archive data.
Looking at the Microsoft Azure offerings the below different products are available:
File
Simple, distributed, cross-platform file system
- Lift and shift migration
- Simple and inexpensive
- Move data to cloud with no coding
Disk
Premium storage for I/O-intensive applications
- Low latency, high throughput
- Automatic triple replication
- Enterprise-grade durability
- Learn more
Blob
Massively-scalable object storage for unstructured data
- Cost-effective for massive volume
- Tiered storage options
- Single infrastructure with global reach
- Learn more
Queue
Durable queues for large-volume cloud services
- Simple, cost-effective messaging
- Decoupled component flexibility
- Resilient scaling and buffering
- Learn more
Table
- Flexible NoSQL database
Key-value table storage
- Structured or unstructured data
- Low latency at Internet scale
- Learn more
Archive
Low cost storage for rarely used data
- Data automatically encrypted at rest
- Seamless integration with hot and cool storage tiers
- Supported by leading Data Management partners
Most cloud providers fit into the same above categories with different service offerings and names, Google Cloud Platform for instance offers the following in Google Cloud Storage:
Please see bottom of the article for links with further details and information.
A good way to start with cloud storage options are with your backup or archival data. By moving this data to the cloud a company can start leveraging the power of cloud without initially moving their entire workload. By storing your backups and even running your daily, weekly or monthly backup runs into the cloud this will provide a cost effective and reliable offsite backup option that can really prove to be invaluable in the case of a disaster.
There are really a huge volume of different cloud backup providers these days which all basically offer the same thing with different types of software. Locally running backups that copy your data to the cloud. All of these products will use either their own cloud storage servers or more likely one of the big cloud providers. You might even be able to get the choice of which public cloud storage provider you use with the specific backup product. You could also go directly to a public cloud provider and use their native cloud backup tools.
There are also on premises to cloud replication devices such as Microsoft's Storesimple that will automatically move your archival or "cold' on premises data into the cloud. This is something that can assist with large enterprise storage volumes and cloud storage adoption.
Ultimately cloud storage is expanding rapidly with the great volumes of data being generated everyday and it is really the future of all data storage. Going forward it will be easier, safer and more cost effective to utilise and migrate your current on-premises storage into the cloud. A good way to start on this journey is with your backups.
Further sources and information:
Configuring backups on VM creation in Azure
In this blog post I will be detailing how to enable virtual machine (VM) level backups during VM creation in Azure. This is a great function as it enables you to automatically create backups of your VM's directly within the Azure portal while creating a new VM.
You can also use the same basic steps below in order to create backups on your existing VM's by selecting the VM and Backup tab on your existing VM's within the Azure portal.
1. Log into the Azure portal and select New - Windows Server 2016 VM (or any other version that you are requiring). Select your relevant basic settings and continue:
2. Select the size of the VM that you would like to create and continue:
3. Under the backup tab, select "Enabled". You can now specify your new or existing "recovery services" or backup vault. This will be a storage location for your VM level backups. You will also be able to select an existing or new resource group:
4. The next step is to configure the backup policy itself, this can be done by selecting "Backup policy" and creating your policy based on your individual or compliance needs.
5. After this has been done you can complete the new VM wizard and your new VM will be provisioned in Azure. Your VM backups will automatically start running based on your policy.
Please note: The steps 3 & 4 can also be completed on an existing VM in order to create an automatic backup procedure. A recovery services vault will also be required for storage.
Once you have completed these steps your backups will be handled by Azure and recovery points will become available under the backup and restore tab of the individual VM's. You can use this to perform point in time restores of your VM's in any backup restore scenarios.
I hope that you have found this article interesting and can enable this on your next VM build!
Source: Please read the official Microsoft documentation for further information:
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