We are excited to announce a slew of features in our February 2015 Azure Backup update. The key capabilities are:
- Long term retention – cloud as tape replacement
- Offline seeding – complete your initial seeding faster and off-the-network
- Backup all DPM workloads to Azure
- Improved monitoring and reporting in SCOM
Download the latest Azure Backup agent from KB3033794. By downloading this update you automatically get all the capabilities released in the last few months:
- KB2989574: Support for data sources more than 850GB
- KB2997692: Long Term Retention and Simplified Signup & Registration
- KB2999951: Support for Windows Server 2008
- KB3015072: Support for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1
This blog provides a quick summary of the features in this release – we will be following up with detailed blogs in the coming weeks.
Long term retention – cloud as tape replacement
With the latest update, customers can specify daily, weekly, monthly and yearly retention policies. Customers can now retain their data for up to 99 years in Azure! If you are using tapes to address your long term retention needs – this release provides a compelling value prop to use Azure to address your backup and long term retention needs.
Figure 1: Multiple retention policies for Azure Backups
Offline seeding – complete your initial seeding faster and off-the-network
Azure Backup enables customers to complete the initial backup by integrating with the Azure Import/Export service. Rather than sending the initial backup copy over a congested network, customers can ship the disk containing the initial backup copy to the nearest Azure datacenter.
Figure 2: Offline backup to Azure
Backup all DPM workloads to Azure
Until this release, DPM customers could backup only Hyper-V virtual machines, SQL Databases and file & folders to Azure. With DPM UR5 and the latest Azure Backup agent, customers can now backup Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange and Windows Client workloads to Azure. Learn more about the workload & platform support.
Improved monitoring and reporting in SCOM
The new management pack for DPM provides a powerful reporting infrastructure that can be used to generate data-rich custom reports and dashboards across multiple DPM servers! Customers no longer have to visit every DPM server to extract the canned reports – the new Reporting Management Pack provides all that and much more.
Figure 3: A demo report based on new reporting framework
Related links/content:
- Learn more about Azure Backup and System Center DPM.
- Click for a free Azure trial subscription, and download the latest Azure Backup agent to get started!
- Need help? Reach out to the DPM forums and the Azure Backup forum for support.
- Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup: contribute new ideas and up-vote existing ones!