O365 Backup - On Premise VS Cloud

[yaberger]

hi,

i support around 10 of small bussinesses including their O365 setups.
i need a solution for backing up their emails
What are the pros and cons of the following setups:

1. install Server in Azure which runs VBO and stores all my clients backups to Azure storage, all managed in cloud.
2. Install VBO on server in my office, save all clients backups to my on premise storage (QNAP) and backup storage to cloud.

thanks

[HannesK]

Hello,
question 1: how would you use the QNAP? As block storage or as SMB 3.0 share?
question 2: how would you backup the storage to cloud? QNAP internal mechanisms?

The reason for question 2: the change rate per day will be quite high, so you would need much bandwidth

In general I would tend to option 1 as you don't need to care about bandwidth in that case.

Best regards,
Hannes

[nielsengelen]

Hi Yakov,

1. Azure works fine, however, the size of the disks may be a limitation for the repositories. This would depend on how much storage your clients are consuming however you could leverage multiple disks and assign 1 or more per customer (tenant). Additionally, you can easily scale out with adding proxies for tenant growth.

Another option is deploying a VBO per tenant, this way you can give the customer access to the machine and they can do restores and management themselves. This may be a bit overkill (it depends on your business).

2. Depending on the setup in your office things can change.
a) If you are running VMware or Hyper-V, I would suggest running a VM on the QNAP storage and afterwards send a backup of the VM to the cloud using Veeam Backup & Replication. Important here is the bandwidth, the change rate won't be extreme however the initial backup could take some time.
b) If you don't have VMware or Hyper-V, I would advise you to leverage the iSCSI share option via QNAP, even though SMB3 is supported (experimental). The problem here is sending the data offsite as VBO uses a live database. This would mean stopping the VBO service, send it offsite and resume the service.

Option 1 is most likely the best option, give VBO in Azure a spin as it is available via the marketplace.

If you have any question on designing around VBO in Azure, let me know and I can give you some additional notes and tips.

[yaberger]

Hello,
question 1: how would you use the QNAP? As block storage or as SMB 3.0 share?
question 2: how would you backup the storage to cloud? QNAP internal mechanisms?

The reason for question 2: the change rate per day will be quite high, so you would need much bandwidth

In general I would tend to option 1 as you don't need to care about bandwidth in that case.

Best regards,
Hannes

1. iSCSI
2. what would be the best choice backup to cloud?

[yaberger]

Thanks vmniels

[Mike Resseler]

Hey Yakov,

If I read it correctly, you are a service provider for those SMB's. In my mind, ideally you would setup VBO locally with the customer on a VM (as already described here...). If you do that, you can become a cloud connect provider (you can run that also in Azure, you don't need specific hardware yourself) and use VBR to backup the VBO VM and then cloud connect to sent it to the cloud. That would give you lots of restore possibilities with very fast to slower SLA's.

However, you might not have those resources so in that case I would go for the Azure option and become a VBO "service provider". Which means you will be adding your small business to your VBO service (running in Azure) and do the work from there.

[yaberger]

Thanks Mike Resseler

I too like the cloud solution.

will start small scale and see how things work