Microsoft's Windows Azure comes in a few different flavors, but for the purpose of this chapter, we will focus on IaaS components, as they contain the most applicable feature set for SharePoint disaster recovery. Just as with AWS, with Windows Azure you can spin up a SharePoint environment on-demand, and dynamically adjust your usage as needs change. The essential infrastructure components that we would typically utilize for SharePoint HA/DR include the following:
Global Infrastructure – datacenters and traffic managers
Virtual network
Virtual machines
Load balancing
Storage
Hyper-V Recovery Manager
The Windows Azure cloud maintains datacenters globally, with locations in the United States, Asia, Europe, and soon in Australia and Japan. This enables several disaster recovery scenarios, such as the geo-replication of Windows Azure Storage to secondary datacenters. Currently, there are eight global datacenter locations...