Azure for backups?

[fiza]

After the scary news of a school burning down http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/173744-someone-fancied-brand-new-network-fire-west-sussex-school.html i thought I should start looking at cloud solutions to our backup. Currently we do incremental backups each night to a NAS and do a full backup each half term. Our full backup comes to just under 9TB, thats everything, shared areas plus student drives & staff drives. A lot of that 9TB is probably old data but no one is willing to clean up their own areas to bring it down.

 

Is it feasible to move our backups to Azure? Is it within the budget of a school to do this? If it wasn't prohibitively expensive I could make a case to SLT and Governors to do it.

 

Anyone have any experience of using Azure for the backups?

[Steve21]

Was looking at Azure for 7-8TB worth and getting quotes of £6k+ back. That's in terms of a location Veeam can use. The price added to the times to upload 7-8TB in a full backup didn't really work :s Unless you get it back to the real basics

 

Steve

[steve_forbes]

Hi,

 

We are currently piloting Azure Backup with some of our customers, one of those customers currently has about 9TB of data to backup and the estimated cost is £3k a year. Given that you don't need any additional software licences to implement this it could be a economical way of backing up data. One of the most important factors is working out what data can be archived and what is short term data for DR etc. We have created a calculator to show schools the potential costs and how the type of data backed up can impact the annual costs, if you drop me your details I would be happy to put you in touch with someone that can talk you through the details.

 

Steve Forbes

Head of Network Solutions

RM Education