Backup to Azure with DobiProtect

Article
01/27/2023

This article helps you integrate a DobiProtect infrastructure with Azure Blob storage. It includes prerequisites, considerations, implementation, and operational guidance. This article addresses using Azure as an offsite backup target and a recovery site if a disaster occurs, which prevents normal operation within your primary site. DobiProtect covers DobiSync and DobiReplicate. DobiSync enables you to protect data by periodically creating a copy of it and storing it onto an object storage server. DobiReplicate enables you to create a copy of objects or data from an object or network-attached primary store, into a secondary store, and to keep the information and related metadata synchronized. For the purposes of this document, instructions will be included only for DobiSync.

Reference architecture

The following diagram provides a reference architecture for on-premises to Azure and in-Azure deployments.

Dobiprotect to Azure Reference Architecture

Your existing DobiProtect deployment can easily integrate with Azure by adding an Azure storage account, or multiple accounts, as a cloud storage target. DobiProtect also allows you to recover backups from on-premises within Azure giving you a recovery-on-demand site in Azure.

Before you begin

A little upfront planning will help you use Azure as an offsite backup target and recovery site.

Get started with Azure

Microsoft offers a framework to follow to get you started with Azure. The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a detailed approach to enterprise digital transformation and comprehensive guide to planning a production grade cloud adoption. The CAF includes a step-by-step Azure setup guide to help you get up and running quickly and securely. You can find an interactive version in the Azure portal. You'll find sample architectures, specific best practices for deploying applications, and free training resources to put you on the path to Azure expertise.

Consider the network between your location and Azure

Whether using cloud resources to run production, test and development, or as a backup target and recovery site, it's important to understand your bandwidth needs for initial backup seeding and for ongoing day-to-day transfers.

Azure Data Box provides a way to transfer your initial backup baseline to Azure without requiring more bandwidth. This is useful if the baseline transfer is estimated to take longer than you can tolerate. You can use the Data Transfer estimator when you create a storage account to estimate the time required to transfer your initial backup.

Shows the Azure Storage data transfer estimator in the portal.

Remember, you'll require enough network capacity to support daily data transfers within the required transfer window (backup window) without impacting production applications. This section outlines the tools and techniques that are available to assess your network needs.

Determine how much bandwidth you'll need

To determine how much bandwidth you'll need, use the following resources:

Backup software-independent assessment and reporting tools like:
- Aptare
- Datavoss

Determine unutilized internet bandwidth

It's important to know how much typically unutilized bandwidth (or headroom) you have available on a day-to-day basis. This helps you assess whether you can meet your goals for:

initial time to upload when you're not using Azure Data Box for offline seeding
completing daily backups based on the change rate identified earlier and your backup window

Use the following methods to identify the bandwidth headroom that your backups to Azure are free to consume.

If you're an existing Azure ExpressRoute customer, view your circuit usage in the Azure portal.
Contact your ISP. They should be able to share reports that show your existing daily and monthly utilization.
There are several tools that can measure utilization by monitoring your network traffic at the router/switch level. These include:

Choose the right storage options

When you use Azure as a backup target, you'll make use of Azure Blob storage. Blob storage is Microsoft's object storage solution. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, which is data that does not adhere to any data model or definition. Additionally, Azure Storage is durable, highly available, secure, and scalable. You can select the right storage for your workload to provide the level of resiliency to meet your internal SLAs. Blob storage is a pay-per-use service. You're charged monthly for the amount of data stored, accessing that data, and in the case of cool and archive tiers, a minimum required retention period. The resiliency and tiering options applicable to backup data are summarized in the following tables.

Blob storage resiliency options:

	Locally-redundant	Zone-redundant	Geo-redundant	Geo-zone-redundant
Effective # of copies	3	3	6	6
# of availability zones	1	3	2	4
# of regions	1	1	2	2
Manual failover to secondary region	N/A	N/A	Yes	Yes

Blob storage tiers:

	Hot tier	Cool tier	Archive tier
Availability	99.9%	99%	Offline
Usage charges	Higher storage costs, Lower access, and transaction costs	Lower storage costs, higher access, and transaction costs	Lowest storage costs, highest access, and transaction costs
Minimum data retention required	N/A	30 days	180 days
Latency (time to first byte)	Milliseconds	Milliseconds	Hours

Sample backup to Azure cost model

With pay-per-use can be daunting to customers who are new to the cloud. While you pay for only the capacity used, you do also pay for transactions (read and or writes) and egress for data read back to your on-premises environment when Azure Express Route direct local or Express Route unlimited data plan are in use where data egress from Azure is included. You can use the Azure Pricing Calculator to perform "what if" analysis. You can base the analysis on list pricing or on Azure Storage Reserved Capacity pricing, which can deliver up to 38% savings. Here's an example pricing exercise to model the monthly cost of backing up to Azure. This is only an example. Your pricing may vary due to activities not captured here.

Cost factor	Monthly cost
100 TB of backup data on cool storage	$1556.48
2 TB of new data written per day x 30 Days	$39 in transactions
Monthly estimated total	$1595.48
---------	---------
One time restore of 5 TB to on-premises over public internet	$491.26

Note

This estimate was generated in the Azure Pricing Calculator using East US Pay-as-you-go pricing and is based on a 32 MB sub-chunk size which generates 65,536 PUT Requests (write transactions), per day. This example may not reflect current Azure pricing or not be applicable towards your requirements.

Implementation guidance

This section provides a brief guide for how to add Azure Storage to an on-premises DobiSync deployment.

Open the Azure portal, and search for storage accounts. You can also click on the default Storage accounts icon.
Select Create to add an account. Select or create a resource group, provide a unique name, choose the region, select Standard performance, always leave account kind as Storage V2, choose the replication level which meets your SLAs, and the default tier your backup software will apply. An Azure Storage account makes hot, cool, and archive tiers available within a single account and DobiSync policies allow you to use multiple tiers to effectively manage the lifecycle of your data.
Keep the default networking options for now and move on to Data protection. Here, you can choose to enable soft delete, which allows you to recover an accidentally deleted backup file within the defined retention period and offers protection against accidental or malicious deletion.
Next, we recommend the default settings from the Advanced screen for backup to Azure use cases.
Add tags for organization if you use tagging, and create your account.
Two quick steps are all that are now required before you can add the account to your DobiSync environment. Navigate to the account you created in the Azure portal and select Containers under the Blob service menu. Add a container and choose a meaningful name. Then, navigate to the Access keys item under Settings and copy the Storage account name and one of the two access keys. You'll need the container name, account name, and access key in the next steps.
(Optional) You can add additional layers of security to your deployment.
1. Configure role-based access to limit who can make changes to your storage account. For more information, see Built-in roles for management operations.
2. Restrict access to the account to specific network segments with storage firewall settings to prevent access attempts from outside your corporate network.
3. Set a delete lock on the account to prevent accidental deletion of the storage account.
4. Configure additional security best practices.
In DobiSync, navigate to Configuration -> Object Storage and add an Object Storage:
Specify the account name for the storage account and the account key:
Specify a name for the Azure Blob Storage connection:
In the next step you will see all the Blob Containers that are configured under this particular storage account. Select the protocol and credentials for containers that will be your sync targets, for example:
Assign the proxies to this Azure Blob connection and click Test connection to make sure that the proxies are able to communicate with the containers:
The connection test results are displayed:
Click "Finish" to finalize the Azure Blob configuration. You can then initiate a new sync session.

Operational guidance

Azure portal

Azure provides a robust monitoring solution in the form of Azure Monitor. You can configure Azure Monitor to track Azure Storage capacity, transactions, availability, authentication, and more. You can find the full reference of metrics that are collected here. A few useful metrics to track are BlobCapacity - to make sure you remain below the maximum storage account capacity limit, Ingress and Egress - to track the amount of data being written to and read from your Azure Storage account, and SuccessE2ELatency - to track the roundtrip time for requests to and from Azure Storage and your MediaAgent.

You can also create log alerts to track Azure Storage service health and view the Azure status dashboard at any time.

DobiSync documentation

For additional details regarding the configuration of DobiSync please visit the DobiSync User Manual.

How to open support cases

WWhen you need help with your backup to Azure solution, you should open a case with both Datadobi and Azure. This helps our support organizations to collaborate, if necessary.

To open a case with Datadobi

On the On the Datadobi Support Site, sign in, and open a case.

To open a case with Azure

In the Azure portal search for support in the search bar at the top. Select Help + support -> New Support Request.