Backups - Who and How?

[mdrabble]

Finance not happy with billing direct to credit card without paper work eg.invoice - so not gone ahead with it at the moment.

@Simcfc73 do Microsoft send any kind of paperwork when billing you?

[HTCPCP]

Depending on site, d2d2t is the main one we use with an extra cloud backup for SIMS through the LA. Then we also have direct disk to tape on smaller sites, and one school uses external hard drives to back up using encrypted drives. We are set to move to a d2d2d2cloud backup over the summer for the main site. Software wise, mostly backup exec, with 1 using microsofts inbuilt system

[Simcfc73]

Finance not happy with billing direct to credit card without paper work eg.invoice - so not gone ahead with it at the moment.

@Simcfc73 do Microsoft send any kind of paperwork when billing you?

 

No, they just send through an email with the usage on. The website doesn't do an invoice but its just about adequate.

[IWDave]

We've just moved to a 32TB SAN/NAS with a synology box.

 

Our host servers backup to it using Altaro.

[vimagoes]

I need to save a copy of my backups outside my school and I was thinking in Azure. I've been looking it and it would cost about £38/TB/Month. @mdrabble have you perform your backups with Azure finally? I've been reading about VEEAM but I'm not decided yet. Any advice?

 

Thanks

Edited April 6, 2016 by vimagoes

[mdrabble]

I need to save a copy of my backups outside my school and I was thinking in Azure. I've been looking it and it would cost about £38/TB/Month. @mdrabble have you perform your backups with Azure finally? I've been reading about VEEAM but I'm not decided yet. Any advice?

 

Thanks

 

Finance weren't happy with the billing arrangements so at the end of the trial period I have to cancel it which is a shame as it worked nicely.

[robyholmes]

I've been running a Azure Backup trail and now converted to pay as you go. After problems with the Azure Backup Agent I switched to the DPM varient on its on server. I was wanting to do this anyway but meant a bit more setup to trial. So we now do B2D2C all in one application. I'm still not 100% on the costs but the above £38/TB/Month is looking about right, depends what you backup. Once the first backup is completed (Took us around 4 days over a 75Mbps link for around 1TB) you only upload changes so backups are pretty quick.

 

The main advantage I saw was I could replace by B2D software (Backup Exec) with Azure Backup Server (DPM) without additional licence costs. I'm backing up none user data (App installers & drivers etc) locally only.

 

We ask Microsoft to put us on invoicing, not had the first yet so can't comment on whats produced but its not paper I know that.

[vimagoes]

In my case I will use it just for having another copy of my backups, so the first month I would upload 2TB and the next just changes. I will chose Local Redundant Store

 

[TABLE=width: 2]

[TR]

[TH]STORAGE CAPACITY[/TH]

[TH]LRS[/TH]

[TH]GRS[/TH]

[TH]RA-GRS[/TH]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]First 1 TB / Month[/TD]

[TD]£0.0305 per GB[/TD]

[TD]£0.058 per GB[/TD]

[TD]£0.0733 per GB[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Next 49 TB (1 to 50 TB) / Month[/TD]

[TD]£0.0305 per GB[/TD]

[TD]£0.0489 per GB[/TD]

[TD]£0.0611 per GB[/TD]

[/TR]

[/TABLE]

 

0.0305 * 2TB = £62.5/Month , not bad I think

Edited April 7, 2016 by vimagoes

[tj2419]

I have two questions.

 

Question 1

When people say they use Free Veeam on physical boxes. Does this mean you can use it to backup physical servers? e.g. server 2012?

 

Question 2

Secondly the way the billing works for azure. If I have 6 physical servers and all the full backups of each server total 4.2TB. Would the costs for azure be roughly like below.

 

MONTH 1 = 0.0305 * 4.2TB = £131.17

MONTH 2 onwards = 0.0305 * amount of changes to files. Would be more like GB than TB from then on?

 

So after a large initial payment (Month 1) whilst the bulk of the files are backed up, each subsequent month is much cheaper as the changes are going to be in the GB rather than TB?

 

Thanks

[localzuk]

As far as I can tell, that pricing looks wrong for Azure Backup. Things appear to have changed somewhat since I last looked!

 

The system now appears to be you pay per "protected instance", and that would depend on how you want to run it. Personally, I'd have it backing up a single instance. You then pay for the storage (which, remember, will increase each month as you add to it). Finally, you add in some bandwidth for recovering files (bandwidth to the Azure data-centers is free, but from is not (past the initial 5GB/mo)).

 

So, for us, we'd be looking at 4 TB initial, then changes of around 70GB per night (including VM backups). If we store 30 days changes, we'd be looking at £114 per month roughly.

 

Though, our internet connection would explode during the initial upload...

 

The pricing calculator helps - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/

 

That is significantly lower than it used to be when I looked last, that's for sure!

[robyholmes]

I couldn't get my head round the calculations for Azure, even the calculator wasn't that close. I found the best way is to sign up for the £125 credit (Lasts for 30 days) and try it for a month. I did find the month was spent getting the thing working (Likely more down to me getting my head around it) so I didn't manage to get much out of it, but meant I had a month to get it right.

 

Now I've nearly completed my first paid month and its looking like just over 1TB + SIMS Database + DPM Database is £45 a month.

 

For me a big advantage is you get Azure Backup Server (DPM) as part of your monthly fee. This gives me 30 days of onsite backups, which 99% of the time will cover recovery jobs plus backups for my apps etc which don't need offsite backups. As for VM's I'm still just using a local backup (Windows Server) but I'm going to talk this over with management to see how fast a recovery they want if the whole place goes up in flames etc.

[ozmusafir]

Use Veeam and directly backup to a NAS box. Currently looking into Azure offsite backup for added protection.