VCC and Azure Costs - Higher than expected

[randerson999]

Ok - we've got Veeam Cloud Connect working now into Azure. Our VCC server is a B4ms VM and we have 3 x Standard HDDs (S50 disks, 3TB each) attached, with a ReFS stripe creating a 9TB drive.

Our costs are coming out to around $475/month with only about 500GB being used in total! The drives make up the majority of the cost, at about $125/each per month. This seems awfully high to me. The VCC VM itself is pretty cheap, at about $110/month.

Does this sound like a standard setup for VCC or am I doing something wrong? I thought this was the de facto config for VCC and these are standard HDDs, so they are not managed or SSDs, so this should be the cheapest way to do it. I understand that VB&R v10 has some functionality that will allow backups straight into Azure cold storage, but for now, I need a more cost effective approach for VCC.

Thanks for any input.

[anthonyspiteri79]

Hey there Ross.

This is one of those situations where the public cloud is not always cost effective. Without seeing the specifics...the costs that you incur are based on your consumption of the Azure resources.

It's true that in Update 4 which is our next major release to Backup & Replication 9.5 we will have the ability to tier off to a capacity tier that is object storage based. In the case of Azure you can obviously use Azure Blob storage. This means you can have a smaller landing zone for your short term retention and use Blob Storage for the longer term retention.

With storage being your greatest cost in the current setup...the Capacity Tier will fix that.

[randerson999]

Thx for the feedback Anthony. Any suggestions about mitigating costs now in the current config with the v9.5 U3 limitations? Can I offload from the Std HDDs that I'm saving the Veeam bkups to now?

I'm not terribly versed with the Azure storage options yet but between the VCC lics and the Azure HDD costs, it'll be about $10k for 500GB of Veeam backups .. lol. Not exactly the kind of numbers you want to give your boss!

[anthonyspiteri79]

While unable to give specific advice in general I'm wondering about your reason for going down the path of Azure for VCC? Are you offering this service to multiple clients or is it just for yourself?

Other thing I can think of is trying to get the 9TB down to something more manageable cause it seems like you are being billed for that total amount rather than then 500GB used by the backup data.

[frankive]

If you are billed so much for the storage cost you must be using managed disks which is priced by the capacity and not the storage used.