Veeam to Amazon VTL Cost, growth and problems

[unsichtbarre]

For years, we had a Veeam Repository in a remote office and used Backup Copy with a GFS policy of: 30 Days, 3 Months, 4 Quarters and 2 Years. At full saturation, after 2 Years, the repository had about 11TB of backups. It worked great, but unfortunately, the office closed!

I decided to try Amazon VTL using this guide: https://www.veeam.com/using-aws-vtl-gat ... de_wpp.pdf
I was up and running inside of an hour with (10) 2TB Tapes, specified as Glacier Deep Archive.

I tried to do my diligence and explore costs and read the price-lists https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ and I thought that, barring any requests or retrievals, I should be paying about $19.80/month for 20TB Deep Archive - but the worst case scenario would be pricing for S3 Standard, which would be around $460/month - SILLY ME!!

My bill has gone from $267.62 to $488.34 to $561.66 in three months!!! (detail below)

My Veeam questions is: have I done something wrong? I set the tapes in Deep Archive, I have 1 month of retention, the Veeam jobs run nightly. Is Amazon really that expensive?

THX,
-J

AWS Service Charges$561.66

Data Transfer $0.00
US East (Ohio)
Bandwidth $0.00
$0.000 per GB - data transfer in per month 11,595.325 GB$0.00
$0.000 per GB - data transfer out under the monthly global free tier 10.284 GB$0.00

Storage Gateway $514.43
US East (Ohio)
AWS Storage Gateway USE2-Gateway:VTL-Storage $398.83
$0.023 per GB-month of virtual tape storage used 17,340.279 GB-month$398.83
AWS Storage Gateway USE2-Uploaded-Bytes $115.60
$0.01 per GB - first 12.2 TB / month data written by your gateway to AWS storage 11,559.958 GB$115.60
Taxes
$47.23
US Sales Tax to be collected

[HannesK]

Hello,
I just read the part with "I have 1 month retention"... that's definitely not the use case for Glacier / Deep archive

To answer the question: yes, Amazon is that expensive if one uses the a tier that does not match the retention

Objects that are archived to S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive have a minimum 90 days and 180 days of storage, respectively. Objects deleted before 90 days and 180 days incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days. Objects that are deleted, overwritten, or transitioned to a different storage class before the minimum storage duration will incur the normal storage usage charge plus a pro-rated request charge for the remainder of the minimum storage duration. Objects stored longer than the minimum storage duration will not incur a minimum request charge.

For short term retention normal S3 or infrequent access makes more sense. Or an S3 provider like Wasabi who does not charge for put / get requests.

Best regards,
Hannes

[unsichtbarre]

In most uses of the word "pro-rated," it means a fraction thereof, equal to the actual use. Moreover, what's "90 days and 180 days," which is it, 90 or 180? I guess based on this model, theoretically, if I shut-down offsite backups and just left the data there - it would go down to the price-list prices?

Nonetheless, my use case should serve as a warning to other users about getting burned by the cloud, or at least being able to decipher the Amazon and other Big Cloud terminology.

The favorable outcome is that I am going to place both a tape-library and offsite Veeam Repository in a CoLo - I will save money (based on my use-case) and achieve better service and performance.

THX
-J

[HannesK]

Hi,
I'm just quoting from the link you posted (the requests and data retrievals tab).

If you just store data once and let it expire after 180 days, then you should end up at about the projected costs. PUT costs still need to be added. Amazon should be able to help you with the details.

To save costs for your scenario, I would simplify and choose one of the following options
1) a provider that is cheaper than Amazon (I already mentioned one)
2) choosing infrequent access tier at AWS (keep in mind that this tier also charges you for "early access" (meaning every read / write costs extra)
3) infrequent access one zone availability

I can only say that things that "sound cheap" are rarely cheap in reality. That's not only with hardware / software. That's a general rule of thumb in my life

Best regards,
Hannes

[unsichtbarre]

No, thank you for your advice! I understand now some basis of the charges coming from Amazon.

You are right, anything that "sounds cheap" probably is.

Let this be a lesson to others and not to be burned by the Cloud and fall victim to the Iceberg Principal like I did.

THX

[Net Runner]

AWS indeed is not cheap cloud storage. Google Cloud Storage probably is the most expensive storage you could get.

I suggest you try Backblaze B2 as an alternative. We have been using Backblaze as cloud storage for cool and archive backups. We had moved from AWS VTL Gateway to StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze B2 for two years ago. The bill is twice less than we paid to AWS. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... ge-gateway

[Gostev]

You could probably drop that VTL now, as Backblaze just rolled out native S3 interface, which makes it compatible with the Capacity Tier.

[Noblesoft]

Not to necro this thread, but it's the first hit that comes up when searching for Veeam + AWS VTL Costs. I've done a bunch of math, and I think the price difference you're seeing between estimated and actual is due to the rate you are paying for your data storage. As I understand it, data that is backed up to a tape and kept "in the VTL" (not ejected and archived) remains in S3... not S3 Glacier Deep as you had intended. This is why it shows a rate of $.023/GB, when you were expecting the Glacier Deep rate of $.00099.

Amazon does no favors in clarifying the way they charge with their calculator... but my interpretation is that Amazon will charge you three ways for this setup:

$.01 per GB uploaded, up to a maximum of $125/month (~12.5TB uploaded, after which uploads are free)
$.023 per GB stored on a "tape", as long as that tape is still "inserted" in the tape library and has not been ejected/archived to Glacier or Glacier Deep
$.00099 per GB for a tape archived to Glacier Deep

(Disclaimer - this is estimates on my part... I have not yet tried this, but am set to deploy Veeam + AWS VTL in the next month.)

In my case, I am anticipating 12.5TB of new data backed up each month, which should cost me $125 in "write" fees and $287.50 in S3 fees (assuming I do not eject my tapes until the end of the month). Then I account for 12.5TB of additional data from month 2 onward stored in Glacier, which comes out to $12.38 on month 2, $24.75 on month 3, etc... So month 1 grand total would be $412.50, month 2 would be $424.88, month 3 would be $437.25, and onward. This naturally assumes 0% data read from AWS (which is expensive), a flat data growth, etc.

[Dima P.]

Hi Andrew,

I do remember that Amazon community was super responsive in terms of functionality/feature requests and, what's more important, is being constantly monitored by their product management team. Can you possibly share those estimates with Amazon folks and ask them to check (as well as pass them a word about missing clarifications in Amazon cost calculator) and let us know how it goes? Cheers!