With SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 approaching end of support, many customers are moving to Azure. They see this milestone as an opportunity to reimagine and transform their infrastructure with the power of cloud computing. Azure’s offer of free extended security updates for three years provides a new lease on life to these servers while giving organizations time to upgrade.

Of the available migration options, if you choose to lift and shift your on-premises SQL Server to an Azure virtual machine as-is, you will still need to manage backups. Although you moved your SQL Server to Azure, you don’t have to move your legacy backup application that’s likely infrastructure-heavy and difficult to scale in the cloud. Instead, Azure Backup is an enterprise-scale, zero-infrastructure solution that protects SQL Server on Virtual Machines (VM) in Azure without the need to deploy and manage any backup infrastructure. This offering is already generally available for more recent SQL Server versions, and today we’re excited to announce Azure Backup support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 end of support in preview.

Built-into Azure, the solution is designed to automatically scale protection to thousands of databases with terabytes of data, so you get the peace of mind that your continuously growing environment stays protected. With self-service backups and restores, SQL Server admin is empowered to do operational recoveries to a point-in-time in one click, getting freedom from long drawn out restore procedures. While centrally managed backup policies and long-term retention help organizations stay compliant, features like encryption at rest and geo-redundancy ensure the safety and security of data at all costs.

Get started

Watch this short video to learn how simple it is to protect your SQL databases in Azure:

This preview support is for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and is free of cost. Learn more about the SQL Server 2008 end of support feature considerations.

Additional resources

• Check out the Azure Backup for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines general availability announcement on the Azure blog.
• Want more details about this feature? Review the Azure Backup for SQL Server documentation.
• Get the Azure Backup pricing details for this feature.
• If you are new to Azure Backup, sign up for a free Azure trial subscription.

The post Announcing native backup for SQL Server 2008 end of support in Azure appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

For the first two implementation types, backups are automatically managed by Azure internally. However, a significant number of customers choose to lift and shift SQL Server from on-premises physical or virtual environments to Azure VM to reduce friction and lower migration costs or risks. Should you choose to do so, you’ll still need to own and manage the backups for the SQL Server VM. Although you moved your SQL Server infrastructure from on-premises to Azure, the good news is that you don’t have to move your backup infrastructure to cloud, thanks to Azure Backup!

Azure Backup fulfills the cloud promise of a cost-effective, elastic-scale, zero-infrastructure solution that eliminates the need to deploy or manage backup infrastructure, agents, or storage accounts. While it offers long term retention and central management capabilities to help IT admins govern and meet their compliance requirements, it lets SQL Admin continue to exercise the power of self-service backup and restore for operational recoveries. It uses the native SQL APIs to leverage the inherent backup capabilities to yield high fidelity backups and restores for standalone SQL Server and SQL AlwaysOn configurations in the Azure VMs.

The solution empowers enterprises to protect their SQL databases by providing a simple and consistent user experience and by giving the capability of management at scale. The following is a list of its key value propositions:  

Simple:

• Get started in no time since there is no need to deploy any backup servers and agents and schedule backups to meet your recovery point objective (RPO) needs as low as 15 minutes, in a matter of a few clicks.
• Complete self-service restores to a point in time up to a second in one click, without having to manually apply a chain of logs over differential and full backups. No more long drawn out and error-prone manual restore procedures!
• Be assured of optimized storage with built-in backup storage lifecycle management that prunes the recovery points as per your RPO and retention policy.

Scalable:

• Get freedom from provisioning or managing storage, as the solution automatically takes care of it internally.
• Create centrally managed backup policies with support for long-term retention spanning years.
• Scale protection to newly added databases automatically via the auto-protection capability, thus managing a dynamic environment efficiently.
• Monitor backups across servers from a single pane of glass and receive consolidated alerts and emails based on events that matter.

The built-in security features of Azure Backup safeguard the backups against malicious attacks, corruptions, and deletions. You can back up encrypted databases, and secure backups with built-in encryption at rest while controlling backup & restore operations with Role-Based Access Control. With geo-redundant storage, you never lose your backup data, even if the entire primary region comes down, your backups are safely stored in the secondary region.

And all of these capabilities come at a reduced total cost of ownership due to elimination of all the backup infrastructure and no overhead of managing at scale because of streamlined operations.

Get Started:

Customer feedback:

It’s been a few months since we announced the pubic preview, and most of our customers see a lot of value in the solution and particularly insist on how simple and fast their backup and restore operations have become:

“Our experience with Azure SQL Server Backup has been fantastic. It’s a solution you can put in place in a couple of minutes and not have to worry about it. To restore DBs, we don’t have to deal with rolling logs and only have to choose a date and time. It gives us great peace of mind to know the data is safely stored in the Recovery Services Vaults with our other protected items.”

– Steven Hayes, Principal Architect, Acuity Brands Lighting, Inc

“We have been using Azure Backup for SQL Server for the past few months and have found it simple to use and easy to set up. The backup and restore operations are performant and reliable as well as easy to monitor. We plan to continue using it in the future.”

– Celica E. Candido, Cloud Operations Analyst, Willis Towers Watson

Additional Resources:

• Check out the Azure backup for SQL VM GA announcement on the Azure blog channel.
• See different SQL backup options from Microsoft and choose the right solution based on your requirements.
• Want more details about this feature? Check out the Azure Backup for SQL Server documentation.
• Get the pricing details for this feature.
• Need help? Reach out to the Azure Backup forum for support or browse the Azure Backup documentation.
• Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
• If you are new to Azure Backup, sign up for a free Azure trial subscription.

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