Microsoft Boosts Azure Site Recovery With Flash Storage
Azure Premium Storage users can now replicate their workloads onto SSDs
Microsoft is offering some Azure Site Recovery customers the option of using flash storage, rather than traditional hard drives for their backup services.
Azure Site Recovery is Microsoft’s flagship backup service, and now users of Microsoft’s Azure Premium Storage will get access to SSDs, a move the company claims will boost the speed of cloud applications and their backup counterparts in storage.
Premium
“If you are running I/O [input/output] intensive enterprise workloads on-premises, we recommend that you replicate these workloads to Premium Storage,” said Poornima Natarajan, a Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise manager.
“At the time of a failover of your on-premises environment to Azure, workloads replicating to Premium storage will come up on Azure virtual machines running on high speed solid state drives (SSDs) and will continue to achieve high-levels of performance, both in terms of throughout and latency.”
Encryption
Natarajan also gave customers more information about the upcoming Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) for data at rest.
SSE for Data at Rest will help customers protect their data to meet company regulations, according to Natarajan, with Storage Service Encryption encrypting data prior to persisting to storage and decrypting prior to retrieval.
Loading ...“With ASR support for SSE, you can now replicate your workloads to storage accounts with SSE enabled,” said Natarajan. The feature is currently in preview.
Azure customers can now also choose to replicate their workloads to a Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) account.
“LRS replicates your data within the region in which you created your storage account unlike Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS), which replicates your data to a secondary region,” Natarajan.
“With LRS, three copies of your data reside in separate fault domains and upgrade domains within the region. From a cost perspective, LRS works out to be much more economical as compared to GRS, and also offers higher throughput.”
