>> There are several different options for
backup storage redundancy in Azure SQL.
Learn more in this episode of Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman and
welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today I'm joined by Uros, who is
the Program Manager on the Azure Data Team.
Thanks for joining us today.
>> Thanks Anna, I'm happy to be here today.
>> Happy to have you. Today we're going to be
talking about understanding backup storage,
redundancy in Azure SQL.
Before we get into it,
I just wanted to ask you if you could give us
a brief backup overview and explain why these are important.
>> Of course. Backups are recession part
of any business continuity and disaster recovery strategy,
because they protect your data from deletion or
corruption and initial SQL customers
can use two types of backups for storing their databases,
short-term backups and long-term backups.
Short-term backups are the backups that can be configured for
up to 45 days and can be used
for point-in-time restores or JuryStars,
and long-term backups are backups that can be configured
for up to 10 years for keeping back data.
In most cases they're used for
compliance reasons because different industries
are carrying different regulations.
>> Got it. There are quite a few different options
that we can choose depending on our compliance,
our regulations, whatever our specifications are.
Now, when we talk about storing these backups,
how is the backup data stored?
>> In Azure SQL database and Azure SQL managed instance,
excluding the hyper scale service scale,
backup data is kept on a storage accounts that are
separate from storage accounts keeping original data.
Furthermore, these storage accounts
are replicated to another internal storage.
So far the redundancy used is Geo-redundancy,
which means that storage account is
replicated to the Geo-paired region.
>> Got it. So typically we're using Geo-redundant storage for
basically all deployments where you might be deployed to East US.
Then the backup will also be in
a paired region which would be like West US,
now, are there other options that
are available or new options, I think.
>> Yeah. As you can probably see on the slide, recently,
we have introduced couple of additional options
for the backup rate storage redundancy.
Besides the default Geo-redundant backup
storage, which already mentioned,
replicates the backup data to the Geo-paired region,
there is a Zone Redundant Backup Storage option that replicates
backups across availability zones in the same region.
Also, there is Locally-redundant backup storage that
replicates data inside the same data center.
While Geo Locally-redundant backup Storage options
are available in all regions,
Zone-redundant backup storage is specific to
the regions that support the availability zones
and that storage support also zone replication.
>> Got it. So there's a few different options here.
How do I go about choosing
which option is going to be right for me?
>> That is a good and important question.
On this slide we can see couple of comparisons.
Customers are choosing between the redundancy.
There are two aspects to consider.
One is definitely data residency,
especially for industries and
different business requirements have different regulations.
If your business is having requirements to
keep the data in the same region,
the zone and local redundancy are the best fit for you.
Because in this case,
data is replicated in the same region across availability zones
or inside the same data center when Local-redundancy is chosen.
With these two options in place,
Geo-restore capability is not possible.
It is specific to
the backup data that is replicated to another region.
So with Geo-redundancy customers are
getting cost-effective solution for disaster recovery.
From the other hand,
pricing is also one of the inputs
when deciding on Backup Storage Redundancy,
because it goes louder starting from geo to the local-redundancy.
This is good opportunity for
cost savings and for reducing backup costs.
This can be applied in some environments where
durability is not so important.
For example, DevTest environments, Q&A environments,
and if there is
some other disaster recovery technique besides JuryStar.
>> Got it. So this has been really useful.
I actually really like that part.
It's like you compare what I'm getting versus
what I'm not getting and see
how price and durability are going to play into that.
Thanks so much for explaining all this to us today.
We are going to put some links in
the description so people can learn more about
what you use when and maybe
dive deeper into some of these options.
Thanks again for joining us today
and for our viewers. Thanks for joining.
If you liked this video,
please like this video,
leave us a comment and we hope to
see you next time on Data Exposed.
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