Azure Backup has announced a new pricing model for data being backed-up to Azure. This new model is based on the number of machines that are being backed-up, and is measured and reported in the monthly Azure bill as Protected Instances. The new pricing has an impact on the Azure Backup bill for the data sources being backed-up to Azure via DPM servers, and this blog provides an overview of the changes that DPM customers should expect.
To begin with, you can read more about the new Azure Backup pricing and have a look at the FAQs on the pricing page.
Protected Instances in a DPM deployment
In deployments where DPM is protecting your data sources, the primary site machines are the Protected Instances being counted for billing. The notion is simple – Azure Backup is charged based on the machines being protected to Azure, and DPM is just the conduit for the data flow. Thus in the sample deployment below, the servers marked in blue will be counted towards the Protected Instance usage and the DPM server (in grey) and the local data is not counted for the purposes of billing.
In this example, the monthly software management cost is calculated and shown in the table below:
| S. No. | Machine type | Size of machine | Size bucket | Monthly cost | |
| 1 | File Server | Physical host | 600 GB | between 500GB and 1000GB | $20 |
| 2 | SQL Server | Physical host | 75 GB | between 50GB and 500GB | $10 |
| 3 | Virtual machine | VM | 30 GB | less than 50GB | $5 |
| 4 | Virtual machine | VM | 150 GB | between 50GB and 500GB | $10 |
| TOTAL: $45 |
Note that Hyper-V hosts are not counted for the Protected Instances calculation. Instead, the Hyper-V virtual machines are used for the calculation. You can find more information on the datasources supported with DPM in the Pricing FAQ, along with more examples.
Estimating the Protected Instances and Storage
A DPM deployment could be a few tens of machines or could scale to a few hundred machines. In order to estimate the number of Protected Instances and the storage utilization, we have published a PowerShell script that is run on the DPM server: The script collects information from the DPM database on the datasource sizes, machines, and recovery points. This information is processed, aggregated, and presented as an HTML output file.
You can download the script from the TechNet Gallery: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Estimating-Azure-Backup-e0d4abbc/.
Once you have the usage numbers, you can plug the numbers into the Azure Backup TCO calculator– an excel sheet to simplify the work of estimating the Azure bill.
Related links/content:
- Learn more about Azure Backup and System Center DPM.
- Click for a free Azure trial subscription, and download the latest Azure Backup agent to get started!
- Need help? Reach out to the DPM forums and the Azure Backup forum for support.
- Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup: contribute new ideas and up-vote existing ones !
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