Microsoft Releases Azure Site Recovery Preview -- Redmondmag.com

The Schwartz Report

Microsoft Releases Azure Site Recovery Preview

The preview of Microsoft's Azure Site Recovery is now available, the company said on Thursday. Among numerous offerings announced at last month's TechEd conference in Houston, Azure Site Recovery is the company's renamed Hyper-V Recovery Manager for disaster recovery.

But as I reported, Azure Site Recovery is more than just a name change. It represents Microsoft's effort to make Azure a hot site for data recovery. While Hyper-V Recovery Manager, released in January, provides point-to-point replication, Microsoft says Azure Site Recovery aims to eliminate the need to have a secondary datacenter or hot site just for backup and recovery.

"What if you don't have a secondary location?" Matt McSpirit, a Microsoft technical product manager, asked that question during the TechEd opening keynote. "Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, [provides] replication and recovery of your on-premises private clouds into the Microsoft Azure datacenters."

The original Hyper-V Recovery Manager required a secondary datacenter. "When first released, the service provided for replication and orchestrated recovery between two of your sites, or from your site to a supporting hoster's site," the company said in a blog post Thursday. "But now you can avoid the expense and complexity of building and managing your own secondary site for DR. You can replicate running virtual machines to Azure and recover there when needed."

Microsoft says both offer automated protection, continuous health monitoring and orchestrated recovery of applications. It also protects Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager clouds by setting up automated replication of the VMs, which can be performed based on policies. It integrates with Microsoft's Hyper-V Replica and the new SQL Server AlwaysOn feature.

The service monitors clouds with SCVMM remotely and continuously, according to Microsoft. All links with Azure are encrypted in transit with the option for encryption of replicated data at rest. Also, Microsoft said administrators can recover VMs in an orchestrated manor to enable quick recoveries, even in the case of multi-tier workloads.

Customers can test it in the Azure Preview Portal.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/20/2014 at 12:08 PM

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