Microsoft Boosts Azure Backup To Over 54 TB

Microsoft Azure has expanded Azure Backup from 1,700GB to more than 54TB as part of the latest flurry of updates to the cloud platform.

“We are happy to announce Azure Backup has increased the size of datasources that can be protected to 54400 GB from 1700 GB,” said Giridhar Mosay, Microsoft’s program manager for cloud & enterprise.

“For customers with large volume fileservers (greater than 2TB) that want to backup to Azure this updated feature will be very helpful.”

Helpful

If you’re thinking that 54,400 is a weird limit, Mosay explains.

“Azure Backup uses VHDX technology to backup these large datasources. The maximum size of the VHDX is 64 TB (65536 GB) and Azure Backup reserves some space for operational metadata. We will continue to optimize and increase the usable space but for this release we have pegged it to 54400 GB.”

Microsoft also announced the week the general availability of Azure Data Factory (ADF), a fully-managed cloud service that can automate data movement.

“You can quickly create, schedule, monitor and manage operationalised data flow pipeline,” said Sonia Carlson, a principal program manager at Azure.

“ADF simplifies how to compose services together, like HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning, to move and transform data of all shapes and sizes on-premises or in the cloud for deep analytics.”

Also new are updates to Azure’s Content Delivery Network. Improved features now include country filtering and compression.

“By default, your content can be accessed from all countries. In some cases, you may want to restrict access to your content by country. This feature enables you to allow or deny access based on the country a user request came from,” said Microsoft.

“By reducing the size of your files, compression improves file transfer speed and thus increases page load performance. This feature allows you to enable compression for specific file types, directly from the CDN.”

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