Cloud Connector Storage and Pricing

[adamwhelan4]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking to sign up with a Cloud Connector partner to store short term and long terms backups offsite. Has anyone had any experience with a partner yet? At initial glance I can see this can get quite costly if you have a larger data set. For example say my full backup is 2TB and I want to keep 4 weekly and 12 monthly and then say 5 yearly. At the end of the first year I would be at roughly 30TB with an average price of say $.13 per GB that would be about $4k a month by the 12th month and $40k for the year. These numbers don't take into account for any growth. Just curious how people are managing their cloud connect storage costs and if they have any different ways to approaching the backups to save cost.

Thank You

[Gostev]

Hi, Adam. I assume people are managing cost issues by looking for a cheaper service provider we have a few hundreds to choose from. Thanks!

[mongie]

Hi Adam,

I have asked myself the same question. The cheapest I've come across is $125/TB. Unfortunately, this is much higher than standard cloud storage (e.g. Backblaze - $0.005c/GB, Google Nearline - $0.01/GB).

Not really sure what you can do about it... My assumption is that a lot of the companies offering the service (80%+) are small operators who probably don't have the economies of scale to offer cheaper pricing even if they wanted to.

I think you just have to limit what you store in the cloud, and consider cheaper options for long, long term storage if possible. I am interested to investigate the concept of the mount server in V9 with a service like Nearline. This might be an option for getting around the limitations of standard cloud storage (having to download the whole backup even to restore a single file from it).

[dellock6]

I'm not going to repeat again myself in saying that comparing a cheap plain storage solution with Cloud Connect is not correct, but at least let me note that you should use the same units to be fair, and say $0,12/GB. And trust me there are large providers offering Cloud Connect, and I've seen lower prices around even without committing upfront for size or duration. Since I work at Veeam I cannot suggest one provider over the other, but you can use the search tool and find them.

Also, the comparison on price per GB only is incomplete, do you know Google Nearline has a Data retrieval cost of $0.01 per GB? And because there's no Veeam component running in the cloud, you need to download the entire backup to restore even a single file of the Guest OS. Say you have a 1 TB backup file (and it's a easy scenario like the vbk full file, not an incremental), you need to pay additional 10,24 USD to restore a single file that maybe is 1k. And you should also count the downtime costs and compare how many minutes it takes to recover that file from VCC, or the entire backup set from a simple cloud storage.

If you still feel the price tag is too high I'm not going on in trying to convince you, but at least comparisons should include every parameter.

[adamwhelan4]

I agree that I am not comparing this with the likes of Amazon or Google storage as I want a true Veeam repository offsite. That said part of my requirement is the ability to take those backups and turn them in to running machines in case of a DR on the cloud providers infrastructure. Not all cloud connect partners offer this, which is why the pricing I am looking at may be higher than others. I guess my main question is in regards to optimal backup copy job settings. Should I be doing delta's for the month to month vs. full backups and so forth to save space. I am not quite sure at what point running with a long chain of deltas would be considered against best practice and risking data.

[dellock6]

even if you do GFS rotation, the fulls are created at the provider side, so bandwidth is saved anyway.
For corruption, as I guess it's what you are thinking about, backup copy does its check both with regular chains and GFS. You should mainly evaluate at which point less-frequent fulls in GFS consume less space than regular chains.

Luca

[timstumbo]

I know this is an old thread but infradms.com has great pricing.

$49.99/TB plus $3.99/per VM being backed up.

I stumbled across this because I was looking for cloud connect storage under a TB for a small client, a lot of the providers start at 1TB. They offer a 500GB option for $24.99/mo.

I'm going to give them a shot and see how I like it.