V10 NAS Backup License Cost

[wa15]

I remember reading in one of the forum posts by Veeam staff that there was not going to be any additional cost for the NAS backup functionality that's up and coming in V10. However, I see in the VUL notes that it's 250GB front end capacity per license? It's disappointing to see Veeam change their stance on licensing over time. I understand prices change but setting expectations and then changing things around a while after is frustrating.

Universal license notes: https://www.veeam.com/blog/introducing- ... cense.html

[veremin]

Actually, there are no changes since the forum post you mentioned - the article just describes the types of workload you can spend the VUL on.

Say, you have VUL license of 10 instances. With it you can protect: 10 VMs, or 10 Servers, or 2500 GB of NAS, or 5 VMs plus 5 Servers, or 5 Servers plus 1250 GB, of NAS, or spend these instances in any other combination of workloads.

So, there is no additional separate license requirement for NAS backup - it's just going to be another type of workload that can be covered with VUL.

Thanks!

[wa15]

Got it, thanks for the information Vladimir.

[Jonathan]

What if we have per socket licences (in our case 3 Backup Essentials Enterprise Plus) and a 900TB NAS? Would we need to buy 3.600 VUL instance licences?

[DGrinev]

Hey Jonathan,

Please contact the Veeam sales representative in your region, they will advise on the best approach cover this much data.

Thanks!

[Jonathan]

I’ve been waiting anxiously for the V10 lauch to learn about the pricing details. Unfortunately, it seems my guesstimate was right.

To protect our 900GB NAS, we would have to buy 3.600 VUL units at a price of roughly 400 thousand euros? That’s more than triple the price of the NAS itself, and it’s per year! Seriously, who is going to pay these kinds of prices?

[Dima P.]

Hello Jonathan,

May I ask where this information comes from? Check pricing calculator here and click request quote for you region. Cheers!

[Jonathan]

Hi Dima,

I used the exact same link as the one you provided. Enter 900.000 GB (900TB), select Non-profit, 1 year. I was expecting somewhere in the region of 2.500 euros, tops. Not 160 times that amount.

[Gostev]

Keep in mind that this calculator is designed for small businesses. Large environments is a whole different story: such prospects are always handled by Veeam sales reps, who can offer significant volume discounts. And for PB-scale NAS environments such as your own, even alternative NAS backup licensing options.

[Steve-nIP]

I used the exact same link as the one you provided. Enter 900.000 GB (900TB), select Non-profit, 1 year. I was expecting somewhere in the region of 2.500 euros, tops. Not 160 times that amount.

900TB? Didn't you just say 900GB? 900TB is an incredibly large NAS.

[Jonathan]

900TB? Didn't you just say 900GB? 900TB is an incredibly large NAS.

It's not that large, only 8 standard DellEMC Isilon A200 nodes. It actually scales to 45PB within a single cluster. We've used stacks of custom built Supermicro Servers at 64TB a piece as well. These shouldn't cost the price of a large detached house a year to back up, right?

[MichaelCade]

This is why it is best to speak to your Veeam sales person regarding any NAS or Veeam licensing purchase. How do you currently backup your unstructured data today? If it is via NDMP then included in the product is that capability today with no additional fees but you will get the same performance as you have today, the new Veeam NAS backup is going to dramatically change your NAS backup windows compared to an NDMP legacy solution.

Your Veeam sales rep is going to be the best person to speak to regarding this.

[Gostev]

I looked up the list price for those 8 Isilons units, and across storage and connectivity that rack looks to be close to USD 1M... so yeah, that's definitely in a whole different league for a more typical Synology/QNAP box most small businesses have, so there's no surprise most people here will see your deployment as an "incredibly large NAS"

Regarding how much "backup" should or should not cost: it's actually a wrong question to ask. The correct question to ask here is how much that data is worth, if it is lost. I've seen workloads where unstructured data was worth more than your entire NAS farm, while being less than 10TB in total size. And I also saw workloads which were cheaper to lose than to backup.

Also, I think it's important to put this NAS backup pricing discussion in the context, because Veeam is not alone in the market. Someone who's selling pretty much every enterprise backup solution out there has shared with me the following pricing data (I'm removing competitors names to be nice, but all these are well known industry leaders):

Q1 2020 price list, 100TB NAS backup, MSRP no discounts:
Veeam = 400 instances = 40 packs of 10xVULs = 40*1200 = $48,000
FOE01 = 100*1TB front-end capacity licenses = 100*1440 = $144,000
FOE02 = 100*1TB front-end capacity licenses = 100*2353= $235,300
FOE03 = 100*1TB front-end capacity licenses = 100*5198 = $519,800

Nevertheless, the key point here is still "if you have big NAS, talk to our sales". It is impossible to create a pricing schema that will be universally appropriate to both shops with a single Synology, and shops with an Isilon farm. So, we design the pricing around the majority of customers and their typical environments, and have our sales taking personalized approach to customers with hundreds of TBs, where significant volume discounts are of course expected.

[Jonathan]

Hi Anton, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

I think you were probably looking at the high performance all-flash nodes. Our Isilon cluster is spinning disk-based, accelerated by a few smaller flash drives. Sales prices are more like USD 150k for a 1PB cluster.

Keep in mind also, that beside the licence cost we still need a backup medium (likely tape). This could take another USD 40k.

We have contacted our sales rep, who in turn will get in touch with our regional Veeam branch.

[paul]

Just wondering how did you guys land at 250GB per VUL, is there some logic?

[Gostev]

The thinking was:

1. With 1 VUL, you can protect 1 VM.

2. Industry-average VM size is 150GB, among which 25GB is redundant/useless data (OS files). In other words, 1 VUL protects 125GB of actual useful production data (when data resides in a VM).

3. There's no reason to believe that production data on NAS is somehow less important than production data in VMs, especially considering that the customer needs to protect both. So, it makes sense that the price for protecting this data is about the same.

So, normally it should have been 125GB per VUL. But this placed our MSRP fairly close to one of our chief competitors (see my post above), so we decided to get aggressive and doubled that number to 250GB to get significantly cheaper. I think it's a good start as MSRP, considering our VUL offerings. For example, this makes it just $160/TB with our Veeam Backup Starter offering.

But as always, we will monitor feedback closely (and also sales results), and will adjust this ratio if necessary in the following product updates.

[DerOest]

Hello Anton,

can you shed some light on how to treat virtualized fileservers, which are currently already getting backed up via normal VM backups, but now with the NAS-feature, too?

Background:
Losts of NAS (~50TB) in virtualized form -> Windows/Linux/Novell OES fileservers already getting backed up by Veeam.
We need the normal VM-based backups for normal OS level backup, but also the whole "OS + NAS-VMDK" for instant recovery purposes.

We have experienced corrupted filesystems in the past with the server running along nicely and VM/block based backup working - until reboot, when the filesystem can not be loaded anymore.
That could be worked around with SureBackup, but that might or might not be always possible.

So we would like to have both:
- continue VM-based backup for all kinds of (instant) restore scenarios
- NAS feature for easier search/restore capabilities and also getting files on a different medium (aka out of the possibly corrupted filesystem into Veeam blobs).

= Double licensing and the question is not "how much is that data worth to you" but actually "how much is that secondary backup worth"
And we'd also pay double for backup storage capacity, which is also a factor in the equation...

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Hello, this is an interesting use case we have not thought about, so let me discuss this internally. Right now, we don't treat such servers any differently from regular NAS.

In general, our NAS backup was designed to backup file shares running on NAS devices which are not regular servers. Because those running on regular servers were never an issue in the first place, as our customers could back them up on the image-level. Doing this also removes all issues unique to file-level backup that we had to solve, such as incremental backups, catalog scalability (number of files) and heavy backup storage fragmentation.

Thanks!

[DerOest]

Anton, it's so great to have you... never experienced better direct contact with any other vendor.

And just a little addition to the above:
As noted in another thread, we also need Tape backup (which NAS does not offer right now) so that would also be handled by the VM based backup scheme.

[Gostev]

Tape out for NAS backup is not impossible down the road, simply because there are a lot of push for it. However, our immediate focus will be D2D related functionality, because:

1. Tape simply does not allow implementing our vision for how next-gen NAS disaster recovery should look like. And we believe these features we have in mind are way more important and valuable than tape out support (which is also important, just less important).

2. We already have "File to Tape" and "NDMP to Tape" functionality in the product as workarounds, which certainly reduces the immediate pressure. I know both approaches have their caveats, but they do provide that "last resort" secondary tape backup many customers are looking for.

[Steve-nIP]

It's not that large, only 8 standard DellEMC Isilon A200 nodes. It actually scales to 45PB within a single cluster. We've used stacks of custom built Supermicro Servers at 64TB a piece as well. These shouldn't cost the price of a large detached house a year to back up, right?

OK, no, fair enough, it's not crazy at all when we're talking about a deployment like that, but it wasn't really what I had in mind. I had foolishly assumed that people already working with Veeam wouldn't have such a large workload that previously wasn't suitable for Veeam's existing VM backup or Agent backup features. It'll be very interesting to hear how the new "NAS" backup performs on this scale.

[Gostev]

From scalability testing perspective, our biggest test lab for v10 NAS backup was 1 billion files with 1PB total size.

In general, number of files and folder structure impact scalability much more than protected data size. So for example, backing up 100PB archive of HD movies would not be a problem at all... but unfortunately, HD movies is not a very common enterprise workload most typical content of file shares are documents and images, with average file size being around 100KB (which means just 100TB for 1 billion files).

[JPMS]

I've followed this discussion for some time and certainly my initial reaction to the pricing was that it was very high, not because it may not be competitive with the market (something I know nothing about) but because I can currently backup our two large data stores (2TB and 10TB, contained within one VM) at the cost of 1 VUL.

I don't have a requirement to backup a NAS but surely wouldn't it just be more cost effective for people to replace NAS hardware with a physical server (and use Veeam Agent) or a VM than pay the licencing cost of backing up the NAS? Am I missing something?

[Gostev]

This is something we've been pushing our customers to for over 12 years now! Of course, anything that can be virtualized should be virtualized.

However, many larger customers require certain NAS features that are hard to replicate with a regular server, which is why they are buying those enterprise-grade NAS devices. Also, some have long-term file versions archiving requirements cannot be met with an image-level backups in a cost-efficient manner.

[dasfliege]

We had to make an offer to a customer to replace his BackupExec with veeam last week. Everything was fine, except of the 80 VULs he would have to buy to backup his 20TB NetApp CIFS Share. Well, we try to convince him to move the share to a virtual windows fileserver, but in my opinion the pricing for NAS backup Licenses is non sense. It's a pretty cool and long awaited feature, but there will be very few people that can afford it to backup larger shares. Just to quote our mentioned customer: "Ouu, in this case i stay with BackupExec and NDMP to tape for ~1500$/year instead of 25'000$/year with veeam."

[Gostev]

Actually, 80 VULs is just 9'600$/year, not 25'000$/year.
Where did you get 25'000$/year from?

And talking about NDMP to tape, it is completely free with Veeam.

[dasfliege]

Sorry, my fault. 25'000 is for 3 years.
But still... For a small-medium business in switzerland it's quite a big amount of money they have to spend, just to backup a fileshare. We offered Essentials Enterprise Plus Perpetual licenses to the same customer for his 6 core VMware farm and those are cheaper then the licenses to backup his share. So it's quite obvious that he won't go with the NAS-Backup option, as it's just too expensive compared to the advantage he will get using it. I just wanted to give some feedback from the market on this pricing policy.

[Gostev]

It's a fair feedback. We'll look at making NAS backup more affordable for Veeam Essentials customers specifically, considering they are small businesses.

[Strela_1]

Thinking of this, offering better prices to big clients could be a way to attract more big corporate clients! The current pricing scale is built around small businesses and private users, so it may look inappropriate for corporate needs.

And 25000€ for 3 years is like 700 euros a month, it's lower than renting a small flat, it is perfectly affordable for a company that has a purpose for 900TB of storage.

[Gostev]

Well, big clients do always get better prices aka volume discounts... it is small clients who have to pay the list price, because they don't get to talk to our sales reps and negotiate their case - nor they have a sufficient volume of data to negotiate against.