The improved backup for cloud assets can be enabled on both classic as well as ARM (Azure Resource Manager) virtual machines with premium disks. Its flexible restore process allows enterprises to recover data either to a premium or standard storage account.
If the restored virtual machine needs the same performance characteristics as premium storage, it can be restored to a premium storage account as well. Otherwise, restoration is done into a standard VM account, which is much more economical.
Customers use premium storage for virtual machines to satisfy the IOPs requirements of enterprise critical workloads. However, the data being backed up is first copied to the customer storage account and then transferred to the backup vault.
It minimizes the impact of IOPs on the production workload and ensures efficient data transfer to the backup vault. Once the entire process is completed, customer storage account is also cleaned up.
Azure Premium storage VMs employ solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of traditional hard drives and give a flash-enabled performance boost to cloud applications.
Last month, Microsoft brought data replication to Premium Storage with an upgrade to Azure Site Recovery. Now, Azure Backup is getting in on the act, allowing enterprises to protect the data stored on their Oracle, Cassandra, and SAP databases.
If you are an existing Azure backup customer, you can start configuring the backup on Azure portal.
