Azure

Microsoft Azure hitting capacity constraints

Looks like Microsoft is having capacity issues in some of its world datacenters including the UK ( Especially UK West)

Microsoft’s statement was as follows

Due to a large spike in demand from customers responding to COVID-19 mitigation measures, Microsoft is managing capacity in some locations and will add new capacity as soon as possible. If your orders are failing, please select a different virtual machine size, or try provisioning in a different region. Microsoft has also paused sale of Reserved Instances, so is unable to process these orders at the current time. We will resume Reserved Instances orders once Microsoft also resumes them.

It is also now prioritizing extra resources for key customers

We are working closely with first responder organizations and critical government agencies to ensure we are prioritizing their unique needs and providing them our fullest support.

“We are also partnering with governments around the globe to ensure our local datacenters have on-site staffing and all functions are running properly,"

Specifically, we are providing the highest level of monitoring during this time for the following:

First Responders (fire, EMS, and police dispatch systems)
Emergency routing and reporting applications
Medical supply management and delivery systems
Applications to alert emergency response teams for accidents, fires, and other issues
Healthbots, health screening applications, and websites
Health management applications and record systems

If you are facing issue the recommendation if to find another region in their 54 Regions

For UK  Partners are advised to provision in UK South is UK West fails. 

For Australia: Partners are advised to provision in Australia South-East (Melbourne) if provisioning in Australia East (Sydney) fails. 

For Asia South-East: Partners facing provisioning failures in Asia SouthEast (Singapore) need to identify the best location for their customers in terms of latency. India South, Korea or Japan are suggested locations. 

For East Asia: Partners are advised to provision in Korea or Japan regions where provisioning fails for East Asia (Hong Kong).

Interestingly enough Google Cloud ( GCP ) which is the largest growing cloud provider in 2019 and Amazon’s AWS which still has the largest market share has had no growth or capacity issues

Microsoft services have been increased in demand by around 700%

This confirms why Hybrid Cloud or Multi Tenant Cloud solutions are used in some situations for extra redundancy!

What is Azure Advanced Threat Protection?

We have spoken about Azure SQL Advanced Threat Protection but what about Azure's product for your onpremise enviroment

Azure Advanced Threat Protection ( AATP ) Uses AI to forward traffic from your environment and detect problems or threats on your onpremise enviroment

 

What is currently protected

  • Pass the ticket (PtT)
  • Pass the hash
  • Overpass the hash
  • Forged Privileged Attribute Certificate (PAC; MS14-068)
  • Golden ticket
  • Malicious replication
  • Directory service enumeration
  • Server Message Block (SMB) session enumeration
  • Domain Name Service (DNS) reconnaissance
  • Horizontal brute force
  • Vertical brute force
  • Skeleton key
  • Unusual protocol
  • Encryption downgrade
  • Remote execution
  • Malicious service creation

How it works

Once a license is acquired an Azure ATP Admin center will appear in your 365 Admin Portal

You create a workspace for each of your Domain Forests , enter the credentials for the domain and download the Sensor onto a domain controller. This uses the Wireshark driver to forward traffic Live to Azure for real time log Analysis 

You can then see issues live as well as schedule reports

License

Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) E5 at 13 Pounds / Month per User

Microsoft is letting its data heavy customers have a Free StorSimple device

How would you like to reduce your initial SAN costs and expenditure and change it to a montly ongoing cost , Microsoft if giving customers its Azure StorSimple 1200 for FREE

Feature StorSimple Virtual Array
Installation requirements Uses virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V or VMware)
Availability Single node
Total capacity (including cloud) Up to 64 TB usable capacity per virtual array
Local capacity 390 GB to 6.4 TB usable capacity per virtual array (need to provision 500 GB to 8 TB of disk space)
Native protocols iSCSI or SMB
Recovery time objective (RTO) iSCSI: less than 2 minutes regardless of size
Recovery point objective (RPO) Daily backups and on-demand backups
Storage tiering Uses heat mapping to determine what data should be tiered in or out
Support Virtualization infrastructure supported by the supplier
Performance Varies depending on underlying infrastructure
Data mobility Can restore to the same device or do item-level recovery (file server)
Storage tiers Local hypervisor storage and cloud
Share size Tiered: up to 20 TB; locally pinned: up to 2 TB
Volume size Tiered: 500 GB to 5 TB; locally pinned: 50 GB to 500 GB
Volume size Tiered: up to 5 TB; locally pinned: up to 500 GB
Snapshots Crash consistent
Item-level recovery Yes; users can restore from shares

 

Cost

  • StorSimple Cloud Appliance 1200 monthly subscription = £94.96
  • You will also need to pay for your storage in Azure Blob

The tiering engine is now based on a heat map. Frequently accessed blocks are kept locally. Colder blocks are deduped, compressed, encrypted and sent to an Azure storage account, which can be cool blob storage (ultra cheap disk).

StorSimple is available as a virtual appliance, with up to 64 TB (hot + cold, with between 500 GB and 8 TB of that kept locally) per appliance.

Other Benefits

  • Auto backups with 13 years of retention.

  • DR Situation you receieve a new unit and can start to use data in 2 minutes of installation

  • Requires 5 Mbps data per virtual appliance for normal usage.

Uses

  • Archive: You need to store a lot of data that is not accessed very frequently. E.g. CCTV , old customer information, financial data and huge Medical Scans.
  • File storage: You can use a StorSimple appliance as a file server, instead of a classic Windows Server. The shares are the same – the appliance runs Windows Server – and you manage share permissions the same way. This is ideal for small businesses and branch offices.
  • Backup: Veeam supports StorSimple as a backup target. You get the benefit of automatically storing backups in the cloud with lots of long term retention.
  • Virtual Appliance can be setup with ready made VHDX/VHD or VMDK Applicancies , attach the disk, configure networking, provision shares/LUNs from the Azure Portal, and just use the storage.

VTL - Why you shouldn't invest in new tape Drives or Tapes

Amazon provides a service called VTL , Virtual Tape Library which means your Existing Backup Programs can utilise this service per normal E.g. Veeam! This means whenever your tape drive fails you can not move to this service with a Gateway and continue on your retention per normal without a shift in Technology or process

Costs

  • Virtual tape storage - $0.024 per GB-month of data stored
  • Virtual tape storage - Archived - $0.0045 per GB-month of data stored

How To 

  1. Download the AWS Storage Gateway virtual machine (VM) from the AWS Management Console, and deploy it where your backup server is located, on VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, or even in Amazon EC2.
  2. Install the gateway and provision storage (DAS, NAS or SAN) locally for the tape gateway. This storage will act as a durable “Upload Buffer" for data being uploaded to AWS, and as a cache for recently read virtual tape data. This Cache Storage space can be used to retain the latest backup for quick local recoveries.
  3. Configure the local gateway as a VTL using the AWS Management Console, associate its IP Address with your AWS Account and select an AWS Region for your gateway to store uploaded data.
  4. Mount the AWS Storage Gateway virtual tape drives and virtual media changer to your existing backup server and allow your backup software to discover the Virtual Tape Library and virtual tapes.
  5. Switch your backup jobs to the gateway, and data will be first written locally to the gateway, cached and buffered for upload into the VTL, which resides in S3. Much like tape automation systems, virtual tapes can be archived to Amazon Glacier for lower-cost retention which removes them from the online VTL.
  6. Retrieve tapes from archive in Amazon Glacier via the AWS Management Console and manage your recovery process via your backup software.
  7. You can deploy additional gateways at other sites, or in EC2 as well, both to back up data from those locations, and also for remote recoveries of your other sites.

Learn more about getting started here.

Azure

Starwind has partnered with Azure to offer a similar product however you need to purchase a VM to be able to do this

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/starwind.starwindvtl?tab=Overview

Cost of this is : $0.01 / Month / GB in "Cool Storage" . and it's Archive Storage ( Cheaper ) is still to be priced