Backup Vaults

Factors that affect cost

• Number of resources backed up

• Storage - The size of the resources that are backed up

• The type of redundancy on the backup storage you choose

• Bandwidth costs for the data transfer

Things to Think about

How many backup vaults should I have

The number of backup vaults you will choose to have can depend on a number of factors, but cost management should be one of them.  Some of the influences in the cost management area include:

• If you have different redundancy needs for different backups then separating them into different vaults can optimize your costs.  If you perform backups with maximum redundancy for the VM’s that need it and minimum redundancy for less important VM’s then you will reduce your costs

• If you have separate vaults for different business units or cost groups then its easier to allocate costs to the appropriate areas.  Billing happens at the vault level and its not easy to break up costs within a vault to allocate costs to different areas.  If you have backups into vaults that you can easily allocate to different cost areas then this will make your life a lot easier

Redundancy

Different workloads and resources may have different needs in terms of backup redundancy.  Choosing the right redundancy options can affect the price per GB for storage significantly.

Make sure you choose the appropriate redundancy for each backup vault.

Backup Frequency

When adding a resource to a backup vault you can choose the backup frequency.  This will affect the number of jobs and the size of the data backed up. The size then in turn will affect the storage which will affect your overall back up costs.

Size

Size is one of the key parameters which will drive your back up costs.  The more frequent the backups, the longer they are retained then the greater the storage required for backups.  This will in turn increase costs.

Archive Tier

If you have a long term retention requirement for backups but they are unlikely to be accessed very often then there are options to use the archive tier which will hold the data in cheaper storage.

Data Churn

Workloads differ in how often their data changes.  For resources like databases the data may change all of the time which would be high churn.  In these cases you can expect incremental backups to be much larger which will have an impact on your storage needs.  For low churn resources the incremental backups will be very small so the storage costs will be lower.

Do I actually need a backup?

One good question to ask yourself is if you actually need a backup for a resource.  Many resources like virtual machines will not have long term data storage on them and they may not need a backup to be configured for them if they are resources which can be easily rebuilt and replaced via an automation process.  An example might be if I have a web server farm using Azure IaaS.  It might be better for me to have an automation process in place which builds new servers, adds them to the group and replaces existing ones on a rolling fashion than it might be to consider backup retention for servers with no valuable data on them.

The more resources you configure for backup the higher the cost will be.

Common Optimizations

Reserved Capacity

If you have a lot of backup storage then a reservation can help you.  You can make a commitment for 1 - 3 years and you will get a discounted price.  The reserved capacity relates to the storage costs.

Tuning Backup Configurations

Reviewing and changing the backup configuration to optimize how often backups are done.

Replication Type for the Vault

For mission critical workloads you are likely to use GRS or ZRS replication but for non critical workloads such as dev/test you may just use LRS.  This will save some money.

Use Appropriate Policies

Rather than putting everything on a default policy, use your own policies to find the right balance of RTO, RPO for your needs.  This will result in the right cost for your requirements.

Use the Archive Tier

Make sure you are using the archive tier effectively to minimize costs.

Selective Disks

If your backing up Virtual Machines you can select which disks to backup.  If you only backup the disks you need to backup rather than every disk then you will be able to reduce the backup size.

How can Turbo360 helps in Azure Backup Vaults cost optimization?

Visualization

In Turbo360 you can see the costs of your backup vaults and the associated meters and sub-meters associated with these.  This will help you to see in your Azure environment where your costs are being spent on your backup vaults.

Note the billing data does not break down the costs very well for individual resources but if you enable diagnostics info for the Backup Vault then Turbo360 can also monitor and view these logs to help you get additional info beyond the billing data.

Monitoring

You could setup a cost management group to monitor all of your backup related costs together holistically and configure monitoring to keep an eye on the costs.