In the previous post, I talked about how we can revamp the backup infrastructure for SQL to backup directly to Azure, you can find the post here. I also mention that there might be some concerns to backup directly to cloud where the backup to URL statement doesn’t support keep a local copy, where you will need to perform another backup if you do need to perform regular restore to other environment (UAT or Dev). Is there any other way to solve this issues?
If you talk to Microsoft about Azure backup solution, you should have heard of an appliance call StorSimple, which is an appliance that sits in your data center and connects to your servers via 10Gb iSCSI, it will provide you a local storage space and can perform backup to cloud automatically within it (via define schedule). It has deduplication built-in down to block level, meaning it will only backup the changed blocks to cloud. The bandwidth requirement will be much less after the first backup compare to direct backup, which will need to send the whole file to Azure. You can customize the backup policy so that it executes daily, weekly and yearly cloud backup at different schedule and retain the number of copies that fits your company needs.
You should already see the benefit of this appliance by now, where you can replace your backup drive with one of the provision LUN from StorSimple, and no script changes is required for SQL! You can continue to perform your normal backup and retains the number of days in that local storage as if it were your old backup drive, you can continue to use any of the backup tools (SQL native, RedGate, LiteSpeed etc) which you currently using and nothing needed to change. It will simply replace your backup media, tape library and perform the offsite backup for you. Since it’s a local storage in your system, it will support any version of SQL, and it does keep a local copy of your production database backup in case you need to perform any necessary restore.
Let me go in a bit more details of the device itself, it available in two different models (8100 & 8600), both comes with SSD and SAS storage, it allows you to provision a LUN for Tier storage or local pin storage. By that it means Tier storage will utilize the Azure storage as one of the tier layer, where local pin will only use the local storage in the device. I will not go into the details of how much storage each model has (I might cover that in the next post or you can contact Microsoft if you are interested), however, the size of the device is in multi-TB, which can fit most of the requirements. As this appliance is connected by 10Gb iSCSI, you can view that is a small NAS that you can connect all your SQL Server to it and perform the backup in this manner, this will make your backup process so much simpler to support.
Last question you might have in your mind is the cost, yes we did save the cost from those tape library, backup tool licenses and 3rdparty company, will this appliance cost a lot more then we used to pay? The answer is no, from the place I located, Microsoft only requires a certain amount of Azure credit commitment for the first year and the appliance is free for you to use! Those credit can be used as any Azure services, including the storage cost that StorSimple will use, or any other Azure service you are using. Which in many cases, it will be much cheaper then what you currently paying. To give you an example, it only cost us around 20% using StorSimple compares to what we used to via using tape library!
Ok you might ask, this is all good, is there any other benefits? I know we all greedy! Yes, there is. Imagine you need to test your 3 years ago backup, traditional, it might take days to get your tape back load it and locate a server which is large enough to perform the restore on it, it might or might not be an easy task as you might not have a spare server that have enough resources to cater it. In StorSimple however, you do not need to worry about that anymore, as the backup is already in Azure, all you needed to do is create an Azure VM (whatever size required), then you can perform a clone from your StorSimple to a virtual StorSimple device in Azure for that given date, attach the cloned LUN to your new Azure VM and you can perform the restore from then on. The clone process is quick, I tried to clone a 300Gb backup to a virtual StorSimple device took around 1.5 mins (within the same Azure region), attach to the Azure VM is very simple and the restore method will be the same as you perform restore on any SQL server. This means you only pay for the Azure VM cost along with the virtual StorSimple storage cost during the testing period of time, and you don’t have to wait for the tape or look for spare resources locally to perform the restore, which is a big help in my option.
If you like to know more about StorSimple, you can leave your comment below and I will try my best to answer them. Alternatively, you can contact Microsoft for more details.
