Azure Backup Pricing Guide (2023)

Azure Backup provides a central interface to manage backups for various enterprise services, including:

• Azure Managed Disks
• Azure File Sharing
• SQL Server database
• SAP HANA database
• SharePoint, Exchange, Hyper-V workloads
• VMWare and bare metal

Azure Backup ensures application consistency through Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and pre/post processing scripts. Storage options include Locally Redundant Storage (LRS), Geographically Redundant Storage (GRS), Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS), and Geographically Redundant Read Access Storage (RA-GRS).

Azure Backup Pricing

Three main factors determine the cost of Azure Backup pricing:

1. fixed cost of services: This cost is incurred regardless of the amount of data or bandwidth consumed.
2. Save: This value depends on the amount of data you save and depends on the backup size, retention period, backup program, and storage type.
3. Average daily data throughput: This value depends on how often the data changes.

The Azure Pricing Calculator allows you to configure various cost components to determine approximate Azure backup costs. However, since the total cost is determined by many variables, using the Azure Backup Pricing Estimator provides greater accuracy. This Excel-based spreadsheet tool also provides accurate Azure Backup cost estimates for the various workloads protected by this service.

Calculate the cost for Azure Backup

Since the total cost of backing up a particular workload takes into account many factors, calculating the cost of Azure Backup requires defining key details for each service. Use the sections below to learn how to do this.

Azure virtual machine (VM) or on-premises server

basic details:

• The "used size" (vs. preset size) of the disk to be backed up
• Total number of servers multiplied by the amount of "used disk space".
• Expected amount of data loss (high, medium or low)
• Backup policy retention period (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
• Redundant Storage (Local Redundant Storage (LRS), Geographic Redundant Storage (GRS), or Geographic Redundant Read Access Storage (RA-GRS))

The table below provides indicative costs for various Azure VM or on-premises server backup scenarios.

SQL Server σε VM Azure

basic details:

• The data size of the SQL Server to back up
• The number of SQL servers of this size
• expected compression
• Expected log file size as a percentage of SQL Server size
• Expected amount of data loss (high, medium or low)
• Backup type. daily difference and weekly, monthly, yearly full or daily, weekly, monthly, yearly full
• Backup policy retention period (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
• Backup storage redundancy (Local Redundant Storage (LRS) or Geographic Redundant Storage (GRS))

The table below shows indicative costs for different SQL backup scenarios in Azure VM.

SAP HANA σε Azure VMs

• The sum of the full backup size per database reported by SAP HANA
• Number of SAP HANA servers of this size
• Expected log file size as a percentage of the SAP HANA database size
• Expected amount of data loss (high, medium or low)
• Backup type. daily difference and weekly, monthly, yearly full or daily, weekly, monthly, yearly full
• Backup policy retention period (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
• Backup storage redundancy (Local Redundant Storage (LRS) or Geographic Redundant Storage (GRS))
• Ability to view estimated or discounted prices for different regions

The table below provides indicative costs for various SAP HANA backup scenarios to Azure VMs.

Azure File Sharing

Basic details:

• The size of the shared file in GB
• Number of storage accounts hosting file shares with reference sizes
• Expected amount of data loss (high, medium or low)
• Inventory Account Type (Standard or Premium)
• Backup policy retention period (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
• Storage backup redundancy (Local Redundant Storage (LRS), Geographic Redundant Storage (GRS), or Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS))
• Performance Levels (Optimized Trading, Advanced, Hot, Cool)
• Ability to view estimated or discounted prices for different regions

The table below provides indicative costs for different Azure file sharing scenarios.

Azure Backup Architecture

Azure Backup uses four different technologies:Azure Virtual Machine Extension,Microsoft Azure Backup Server(MABS),System Center Data Protection Manager(Vice Prime Minister), and Microsoft Azure Recovery Services(Mars).

• virtual machine extension:Use a small program to back up virtual machines after deployment.
• Society of Molecular Biology: Can be deployed using an on-premises server or an Azure virtual machine. It uses the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing service model when you run it on servers you manage.
• Digital PM: Same as MABS, except for licensing. if you have System Center in your on-premises environment, DPM falls into this model.
• Mars: Can be deployed using a lightweight agent on selected workloads. it can run without any infrastructure and uses the platform as a service (PaaS) cloud computing service model.

The Azure installation guide indicates which architecture to use based on the type of workload being backed up. The following screenshots show the installation wizard.

In the second example, when we select Azure as the workload location and select a virtual machine, it uses the Azure VM extension to protect the workload.

The solution Azure chooses depends on the workload and location mix. The following table describes the limitations and advantages of each Azure Backup solution.

Azure Backup Cost Optimization

You can optimize your Azure backup costs in the following ways.

1. Optimize your backup strategy

Microsoft Azure Backup provides three backup strategies: full backup, differential backup, and incremental backup. Each type of insurance has its advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost, recovery point objectives, and recovery time objectives. The key to optimizing Azure Backup is applying the appropriate policies to the workload in question. It is not efficient to configure general policies for each server, database, or file store.

Recovery Point and Recovery Time targets

Recovery points and recovery times are a key component of any backup strategy.

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Related to the time the backup was made. For example, if you perform backups once a day, the RPO is 24 hours. In this case, you may lose up to 24 hours of information if you need to recover the data.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Indicates the time required to restore the data from the backup. For example, if you store your data on a local disk, the recovery time will be much less than if you restore it from a data center somewhere else in the world.

The backup strategy's RPO and RTO determine the type of backup required for each workload. It also defines your backup plan. If your backup strategy requires a very high RPO, make sure backups run more frequently. In terms of RTO, a full backup provides the fastest recovery time because you only need to restore one backup.

Differential backups provide the second fastest RTO because you have to perform two restore operations: the last full backup and the most recent differential backup. Incremental backups are probably the slowest type of backup to restore. Since you need to restore the last full backup and every incremental backup since then, you may need to perform several operations to restore the data.

Optimize recovery points and recovery time targets

If the workload does not require a very high RPO, setting backups to run less frequently will reduce the cost of Azure backup storage. The same approach can save you money when it comes to RTO. For example, running a full backup every day saves more data than a full backup every week and incremental backups every other day. Looking at the Optimization tab in the Azure Backup report is a quick and efficient way to determine which workloads are configured for daily full backups. From this screen, you can click on the backup policy and change it for workloads that require a lower RPO.

2. Check the backup of the deleted resource

The Azure Backup service stores backups until they are deleted by an administrator. Although the retention policy determines how many successful backups it keeps, the data is kept forever if the workload no longer exists. In some cases, organizations may need to retain this information. For example, some regulatory frameworks require companies to keep records for several years. However, in many cases, administrators fail to delete backups when they disable a particular service.

Regularly checking your Azure backup reports can help you determine if any backups are taking up storage that you no longer need. You can also configure these reports for deliveryIdle resource details. This reporting configuration also helps you identify any protected resources that have not reported successful backups for a long time. You can find this information by going to the Optimization tab and selecting the Idle Resources field.

3. Shorter storage periods

The retention period you specify when you configure your Azure Backup policy affects how much you'll be charged for the service. In some cases, you can meet compliance requirements and RTO and RPO goals by reducing the length of the retention period.

For example, a web server may require backups, but not a very long retention period. a database may require a longer retention period for more frequently performed backups.You can set a retention period when you configure Azure Backup.

4. Selective backup

In many cases, you only need to protect a portion of the data in a particular workload. For example, a virtual machine might have a second drive to store non-production data, or a database server might contain a mix of test and production information. In these cases, it is inefficient and expensive to configure full backups of entire virtual machines or databases, especially when backing up large amounts of data.

The Azure Backup service allows you to include or exclude specific objects in your backup strategy. If e.g. need to back up an Azure VM, you can choose to include or exclude specific disks. It also has an OS-only disk option, ideal for servers that host important services but not data, such as web servers.

Azure Backup Limitations

While Azure Backup offers many features that make it an enterprise-grade data protection solution, the service has some limitations. Before deploying Azure Backup, administrators must ensure that these restrictions do not violate any compliance obligations or business requirements.

The following list describes some of the limitations of the Service.

• Maximum backup frequency: The maximum backup frequency is every 15 minutes for SQL Server and every hour for other workloads using MABS/DPM. The MARS agent only allows a maximum of three backups per day. If you back up with VM extents, the backup frequency drops even further to once a day.
• disc: Azure Backup does not support Ultra SSDs, volatile disks and NVME/ephemeral disks.
• static IP address: If you restore a virtual machine, the virtual machine configured with a static IP address will lose the association.
• Linux support: The MARS agent does not support Linux. To protect Azure Linux VMs, use the Azure VM extension. MABS/DPM Linux support is limited to native Hyper-V and VMware platforms.