(gentle music)
- Hey, hi there.
I am Subhash, product manager
at Microsoft with Azure Files Team.
I will be talking
about Azure Files data protection capabilities today.
This presentation can help you to kind of stitch
the overall data protection for Azure Files.
If you're a new user or an existing user, don't mind.
Look at this presentation,
you will be able to find out what's new
and what's available today
in the data protection for Azure Files.
So first up, let's understand what is Azure Files.
Azure Files is a fully managed cloud file share offering
by Azure Cloud.
So it can be accessed by industry standard protocols
or NFS or SMB clients and also completely REST enabled
for automation for three P integrations and so on.
They're basically, two categories
in which these file shares are offered.
One is standard, the other one is premium.
These file shares are offered
based on the performance categorization,
standard being the low performance and the premium.
But each of these offerings have unique set of workloads
for which they attract, and that's how typically
our customers choose between standard and premium.
So if you look at it,
standard file shares are generally best suited
for general purpose file shares
and user directories, etc., which are basically
for your file servers in the on-prem world.
And because of the ease of use
and of the cloud file share and the benefits
of the cloud and also the cost-benefit ratio,
we see a lot of other workloads such as backup,
DevOp Libraries, build shares are being deployed
on the file shares of late.
On the other hand, customers deploying their databases.
Business apps generally choose premium offerings
of Azure Files because of the performance
and the latency requirements,
workloads like VDI containers choose premium
for their backend storage.
Again, citing performance reasons.
So we have lot of customers who use Azure Files
in a hybrid cloud scenario
with Azure Files sync offering.
This basically would enable customers
to stretch their on-premise windows file server environment
into cloud and access various benefits
in terms of scale, agility
and of course, reduce costs when it comes to compute
and hardware in the on-prem side.
So we'll also talk about how Azure Files Sync
and its associated solutions help
in the data protection aspect as well
in the upcoming slides.
Now with that introduction of Azure file share
and its use cases, let's shift focus on the data protection
which is our key subject for today's video.
Before we dive in,
let's understand why would someone need data protection
at the first place.
And I think that's a no-brainer today
to ask such a question also.
And it's really important for enterprises today
to have robust data protection technique
because data is at the heart of everything
that you do today.
And data is basically fueling your businesses
across your verticals.
Making sure the data is protected against various data laws
and corruption scenarios becomes really important.
And more so important would be to protect data
against ransomware which is really hampering
businesses across today.
And it's a top priority for data owners to have products
and solutions to protect against such disasters.
And finally, data needs to be protected
to serve your regulation and compliance needs
which are must to have today to operate businesses legally.
So net net data protection is top of mind to all enterprises
and it's no different for us internally as well.
Our focus is to provide data protection
to all scenarios that are important for our customers.
So with that, let's quickly jump
into some of the basic concepts here.
So let's quickly brush up the concepts around RPO and RTO.
RPO and RTO is a key number that you will always keep handy
when you would want to decide
on the data protection technique
and solution that you would want to choose
for your businesses today.
In simple terms, RPO will basically tell you
how much data loss you can sustain to run your business
since the failure RTO will tell you how soon
you could be up and running after that failure.
Key thing to note here is the cost
of the solution really depends
on your RPO and RTO number.
The solution will cost you high
if your needs tend towards zero RPO and RTO solution
which means that I need my business to be up and running
in matter of few seconds.
And then also after the disaster strikes,
I cannot sustain any data loss.
There are various solutions in the market
that can offer such a solution starting with snapshots
or sync application, etc.
But one could argue that snapshots are cheaper
but still you are putting into a high cost bucket.
But that's actually really true.
Snapshots will help you in serving RPO and RTO,
lower RPO and RTO requirements.
But snapshot is not a copy of data, mind you.
Snapshots exist in the active file system
and can be accessed
only until the production system is live.
So we need to have an additional copy
for the extended data loss scenarios that will add on
to costs for zero RRP and RTO scenarios.
Whereas for high year RPO and RTO numbers,
the cost generally reduces.
So we need to make sure we design our solutions accordingly
and we at Azure have solution that fits
across all the spectrums.
And then let's go over some of those in the next slide.
So here is a data protection spectrum that Azure offers
based on the RPO and RTO requirements
to be discussed about in the previous slide.
RPO and RTO is basically numbers that can help you to decide
on your data protection solution as I said.
Zero RPO on RTO solutions are called
as high availability solutions for which you have LRS
and then ZRS offerings from the Azure storage.
LRS is basically locally redundant storage
which can help you
with the hardware failures local to data centers.
ZRS is more on the zone redundant storage
which can help you with zero RPO
on RTO solution with data center-wide failures
and for customers who are looking
for the slight variations in RPO, RTO
can look at cross region replication
with our geo redundant storage
with which you can expect an RPO of 30 minutes
an RTO of one hour if designed appropriately.
And it all depends on various other parameters
like incremental data churn that you have, the bandwidth
for replication and then things like that.
And also we have solutions that can offer RPO and RTO
in days to our backup solutions like Azure backup
and integrations with 3P solutions.
So just to summarize, we have solutions
that can cut across various RPO and RTO requirements.
We just have to choose the right solution
that is required for our needs.
Like for DR, you could choose
between LRS, ZRS and GRS options.
For long-term retention and ransomware recovery,
mostly customers would choose backup and restore options.
Here are some of the data protection capabilities
that are built into Azure Files storage platform
that can help you to achieve the RPO and RTO numbers
that we just spoke about.
The top row is basically account logs,
soft delete, and snapshots that can help you
in accidental deletions and malicious admin scenarios.
The bottom row is basically targeted to create copies
of the data to make the data more reliable
and durable and available.
So one should be able to recover data
from any kind of disaster or corruption scenarios.
So that's the reason you create copies of data.
So we have solutions
for ransomware protection solution as well
with first party and third party integration.
Azure backup recently introduced vaulting capability
for Azure Files which can actually enable
long-term retention scenarios
for compliance and regulatory purposes.
So we should talk about this more in the upcoming slide.
So here is just a sneak sneak peek of what Azure Files
robust data protection capabilities can do all about.
In the next few slides, I will double click
on each of these capabilities a bit more in detail.
So we have protection
across various levels to prevent accidental deletions,
be it intentional or non-intentional.
First up is storage account locks.
This is really a cool feature that can enable admins
to lock their storage account.
This will prevent users
from deleting the storage account
and hence the data in the storage account is safe
and cannot be deleted at any cost.
There are basically two modes.
One is cannot delete lock,
which means that user will not be able to delete
or delete at all and but can modify certain configurations.
There is another mode which is read-only lock
which prevents deleting and also modifying configurations.
So it's kind of additional safety for admins
against malicious admins or rogue admins.
The other technology is soft delete.
This can help prevent accidental deletions
of Azure Files at the share level.
Basically this operates at the file share level.
So if a file share is soft delete enabled and is deleted,
then it moves to a soft deleted state internally.
So until the soft deletion retention expires,
that you have set,
the share can be retrieved at any given point in time.
So as far as billing is concerned,
it's basically built based on what you use capacity
when the soft delete is enabled.
Snapshots is other key capability which will help you
to restore files and directories within a file share
if accidentally deleted or in corruption scenarios.
So you could have multiple recovery points
to cater low RPO requirements.
The share snapshots are incremental in nature
and therefore, very, very space efficient.
So in case of snapshots,
one would be charged only the incremental changes
and that would be stored as part of the snapshot capacity.
Shifting gears, let's look at the replication options
that are available for HA DR solutions
within Azure platform.
Azure file supports all the redundancy options offered
by the Uber Azure storage.
LRS is a locally redundant storage
which is opt-in by default.
So whenever you create a file share, the storage account,
it has three copies of data
which is stored locally in the same data center.
This helps you against local disk failures
or node or rack failures in the data center itself.
Data is replicated synchronously
across all three copies of data.
So there would be no data loss
so it's zero RPO and RTO solution.
ZRS is the other type of storage
which is called a zone redundant storage.
This is basically a high availability solution across zones.
Here you would have, again, three copies of data.
Each copy is placed in one zone.
Zones are typically spread 300 miles apart.
Therefore, ZRS type of storage
will predict against data center-wide failures.
And again, here data is synchronously replicated
across all three copies and three zones.
So there is no data loss whatsoever.
The third copy is a GRS
which can protect against region-wide failures.
This is a cross-region replication
that is offered within Azure.
The zones typically make up a region
and if the region is impacted,
all zones within the region are considered to be failed.
So GRS held you to protect against region-wide failures.
The replication typically is async replication
and will have data loss.
The RPOs could range from 15 minutes and two hours
depending on the replication bandwidth and availability
and the data transfer size, etc.
So one has to test validate before committing
to any RPO and RTO numbers externally to customers.
So let's now look into some of the hybrid solution areas
that we have in offer to protect the file data.
Azure File Sync plus Azure Backup
is a great combination when it comes
to hybrid cloud backup from on-prem to cloud.
Azure File Sync is a native Azure service
that keeps everything in sync with centralized file share
and local file server or brand servers.
So this makes file backup really easy when it comes
to backup and recovery as well.
Recovery can be various scenarios.
You could recover single file
or directories in case of accidental deletions.
Even perform rapid DR in case of hardware failures.
DR is really simple.
You just need to bring up a new server on the primary point
to the centralized file server on the file share
on the cloud and access the data and you are ready to go.
Over a period of time data will be cached
and copied onto the local file server
based on the file sync settings you have.
So that's how easy the DR is.
Azure backup is other key native service which can be used
to save backups per your centralized Azure file share
in the cloud via snapshots and vaulting capability.
So this is a popular use case again as I said,
which will be used in a hybrid cloud scenario
and we see a lot of customers leveraging Azure File Sync
and Azure Backup
for doing such hybrid cloud backup scenarios.
Another key solution area is Azure Backups Integration
with Azure Files.
This is a typical backup use case where users
configure a periodic scheduled backup of the file share
to a blob destination and then this will open doors to bunch
of use cases and scenarios that can benefit customers.
Some of them are long-term retention
which is key for compliance and regulatory purposes.
Ransomware protection is the other key benefit
which is like top of mind for all enterprises today
and this can be served by Azure backups integration.
Enable 3-2-1 use case.
Again, this is a very popular important scenario
which every backup admin will look for
in the data protection solution.
With Azure backup integration, you could basically back up
your files to a locally GS enabled blob account
and remember, GRS storage would help you
to replicate the data to a different region.
So in this setup, you can have three copies of data.
First copy, your production copy,
the second copy, your GRS local copy
for your immediate recovery scenarios.
And third copy is your offsite backup
which can be mostly your tape replacement copy as well
in most of the tape backup scenarios.
So this entire use case can enable the cross region backup
and recovery as well for the DR scenarios as well.
Alright, just to wrap up, here's a quick summary
and the key takeaways from today's discussion.
We found that Azure Files data protection
capability solution services cuts across all key scenarios
that customers today are looking for.
HA DR basically served by the building replication options
like LRS, ZRS and GRS options.
Operational recovery use cases for accidental deletions
and corruptions can be served
by snapshots and soft delete.
Ransomware recovery and long-term retention is served
by the Azure backup integrations and 3P solutions.
Thank you for viewing the presentation.
For more and information
for Azure Files data protection capabilities and portfolio,
refer to our documentation.
Thank you.
(bright music)