Monat: August 2017

Plan Backup and Disaster Recovery for Azure IaaS Disks

We have recently posted an article explaining the Backup and DR for Azure Disks. We encourage Azure IaaS users to refer to this document for planning the right Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) methodology for their disks. Following are a few considerations.

Durability of Azure Disks

We are excited to report that Azure has consistently delivered enterprise-grade durability for IaaS disks, with an industry-leading ZERO % Annualized Failure Rate. This means that Azure has never had a permanent failure of an IaaS disk. For Azure customers, it directly translates into lower cost, better reliability, and smoother operations for the critical applications running on Azure. For example, you don’t have to build costly RAID solutions with redundancy in most cases because Azure protects your data with three redundant copies stored locally. Even if two different hardware components that hold your disks fail at the same time, durability of your data is protected and Azure automatically spawns new replicas in the background to replace the lost copies. We built the Azure disks platform with the core consideration that protecting the data is critical to any storage platform. With Azure disks, you won’t have to constantly worry about losing your disks in the cloud.

Hardware faults can sometimes result in temporary unavailability of the VM, which is covered by Azure SLA for VM availability. Azure also provides an industry-leading SLA for single VM instances that use Premium Storage disks.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

While the platform has built-in protection for localized hardware failures, you must still plan for Backup and Disaster Recovery for safeguarding against major incidents which can cause large-scale outages. This includes catastrophic events like hurricane, earthquake, fire etc. For DR, you should plan the periodic backup of your data to a different geographic location. Please refer to Backup and DR for Azure Disks article for details.

An important thing to consider for Disk backups is to take “consistent backups”. The backups must be taken at a coordinated, consistent state of all the disks on a VM. When possible, this must be coordinated with the applications also to produce “application consistent” backups. This is necessary to make sure you can restore the VM and the application to a valid state at the time of recovery.

Azure Backup Service can be used as the Backup solution for your disks, and it works with Managed Disks as well as Unmanaged Disks. Backup Service handles the coordination of disks for consistent backup and offers GRS option for the vault which replicates the backup to a different geographic region for DR.

Another solution is to create “consistent snapshots” for the disks. In this case, you have to handle the coordination of disks for creating consistent backups, and the replication of backups to different geographic location.

Refer to Backup and DR for Azure Disks article for more details.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Azure expands with two new regions for Australia

I am delighted that Microsoft Azure will be expanding into two new regions in Australia. This increases the number of Azure regions announced across the globe to 42, which is more than any other major cloud provider. Microsoft will become the first major cloud provider to offer regions specifically focused on the needs of the government and their partners in Australia.

The two new regions, available in the first-half of 2018, are intended to be capable of handling sensitive Unclassified data as well as Protected data. Protected is a data classification for the first level of national security classified information in Australia. This is being achieved through a strategic partnership with the Australian-owned firm Canberra Data Centres (CDC). CDC are the preeminent specialist datacenter provider for secure government data in Australia with four modern Canberra-based facilities that hold the accreditations and security controls to handle even Top Secret classified data. Government customers currently using the secure Intra-Government Communications Network (ICON) will be able to directly connect to Azure in Canberra.

Microsoft Azure has announced 42 regions around the world – more than any other cloud provider

This announcement builds on recent news that dozens of Microsoft Azure services have received certification by Australian Signals Directorate, including services for machine learning, internet-of-things, cybersecurity, and data management. Along with Australian certifications for Office 365 and Dynamics 365, Microsoft is recognized as the most complete and trusted cloud platform in Australia. By comparison, other major cloud providers are only certified for basic infrastructure services or remain uncertified for use by the government.

Today, government, healthcare, and education organisations are already some of the most rapid adopters of Azure from existing regions in Sydney and Melbourne. 

The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection is using Azure for applications that help protect the country’s vast borders. 
Bendigo Hospital in Victoria is building the first hospital-in-the-cloud on Azure, connecting and analysing healthcare data to better care for patients.  
The government in Tasmania is working with an Australian start-up, The Yield, to build the internet of oysters on Azure. 
These are just a few of the many stories of innovation in the Australian public sector that are enabled by Azure.

New regions designed to cater for the needs of government, growing certifications from the Australian Signals Directorate, and a history of empowering the digital transformation of organizations is helping Microsoft become the most trusted, innovative cloud for Australia. 

You can read more details about this announcement at the Microsoft Australia News Center.
Quelle: Azure