I have been using Veeam for a very long time.
In all of those years it has been working great.
I have no issues with them. Technology wise they have a great product and are a great company.
I have only 2 complaints:
Do you know that if you wan’t to copy a job, you need to have Enterprise version?
And that you can’t set backup for the last day of the month out of the box?
What I have noticed is that they possess another strength, they have crazy good
marketing. I bet that without their marketing they would not be as successful.
Comparing trends on Google we can see what Veeam effect has caused to BackupExec (a big part is their – Symantec – own fault),
While google trends is not 100% accurate, it shows how trend is moving and Veeam is moving fast and moving up.
They have 5 types of Backup & Replication:
1. Free
2. Standard
3. Enterprise
4. Cloud edition of Standard and Enterprise
5. Enterprise plus (recently announced)
First payed product in line is Standard, it’s basically a backup and replication. No fancy features and crippled WebUI functionality (like file restore being disabled).
Enterprise has all the bells and whistles, It has UAIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery)
SureBackup (automated recovery verification) and On demand Sandbox.
Now, Cloud edition is basically either regular Standard or Enterprise edition which has support for backing up to the cloud. You see, not only do Veeam think that there should be special Cloud edition, but they also don’t provide perpetual licence for Cloud edition.
Cost for 4 Socket Enterprise backup is US$ 6156.00 for 3 years (mnt. included)
Cost for 4 Socket Enterprise backup Cloud is US$ 7788.00 for 3 years (subscription based)
Cost for 4 Socket Enterprise backup is US$ 7916.00 for 5 years (mnt. included)
Cost for 4 Socket Enterprise backup Cloud is US$ 12980.00 for 5 years (Subscription based)
With Cloud backup you overpay US$ 1632.00 in 3 years, US$ 5064.00 in 5 years.
That is a lot of money for Cloud premium – some other vendors have Cloud functionality included in the product as a regulard feature.
Another interesting thing with Veeam is slow but steady price increase.
Let’s take a look at changes in pricing for Veeam backup and replication over 5 years period.
Wow, 50% increase in pricing for Standard version and 40% increase for Enterprise version.
With new Edition Enterprise plus, Veeam marketing showed beauty of perfect execution and created benchmark for others to follow.
- Revealing feature one by one,
- Price increase,
- Notifying customers that there will be price increase for standard and enterprise,
- Revealing new Enterprise plus edition which costs more,
- Notifying customers that if they upgrade to Enterprise version they get Enterprise plus for free.
As if they are chasing quarter target for revenue increase and customer base increase, this was not the first time nor will it be the last.
Customers who fell victim for Veeam marketing and chose to upgrade to Enterprise plus, I hope that they calculated increase in maintenance cost.
Maintenance for 4 Socket Enterprise goes for US$ 879 per year
With new pricing recently announced maintenance will increase for 14% to US$ 1000
If Customer chose to upgrade for free to Enterprise plus, maintenance will increase for whopping 82% to US$ 1599.00, double that if customer has 8 Sockets.
And that got me thinking, does Veeam dream of Big MSPs and Cloud providers? Perhaps moving higher on the ladder in Backup space?
Maybe they should just merge 3 products in one called Enterprise, perhaps having separate Cloud edition.
Slowly they are moving away from SMB market to the enterprise, leaving that market to other vendors.
I am not against Veeam, I do like the product, but for any new customers who are looking for a good reliable backup, and find Veeam a bit too expensive, there are alternatives, goods ones. Also, some customers may find Standard version too limiting and can’t afford Enterprise version, there are also some who don’t like yearly price increase.
There are alternatives:
- Unitrends (only good things about them, they have good promotions from time to time),
- Altaro Hyper-V Backup
- Nakivo Backup & Replication also comes to mind with good pricing and nice feature set.
If you dislike Veeam for any reason they have trade in promotion. - PHD Virtual, also good and affordable,
As for me, I will continue with Veeam for a while, I hope that my number one feature gets included one day (backup on the last day of the month) and perhaps I will see the day when customer will be able to select only features they need (not every one needs all of them). I will try to review some other Backup solutions and test Veeam V7 as it’s released. WAN acceleration sounds sweet 🙂 .
Veeam is solid product, but the high prices and inability to backup physical servers led me to choose zetta.net for our backup and recovery.
While I did heard some good stuff about Zetta, pricing is a bit off for me.
They only provide subscription based licensing, they may seem cheap for some but very expensive for the others.
The same goes for Veeam, they may seem expensive to some and very affordable for the others.
Like I said, Veem is constantly increasing prices, but it can be still more affordable than Zetta.
It depends on environment. Then again, if pricing is concern, there are alternatives, Zetta is not.
Zetta is quite expensive + subscription based… I’ll pass.
Thanks for the kind words about Unitrends. If you haven’t already, please do download our Free Edition (4VMs, Free Forever): http://www.unitrends.com/products/software/download
Actually, for anyone reading this article, I’d be happy to grant a more robust NFR (Not-For-Resale) license, normally held for VMware and MSFT certified professionals. Simply shoot me an email at jsipala@unitrends.com and I will hook you up!
Why are people talking about Unitrends Enterprise Backup? A few reasons:
+ Deploy as a VMware or Hyper-V virtual appliance
+ Protect virtual AND physical servers
+ Protect 100+ versions of servers, storage, operating systems, hypervisors, and applications including NAS, SAN, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, AIX, Solaris, iSeries, SQL, Exchange, Oracle, VMware, Hyper-V, and many others.
+ Instant Recovery with Failover Virtualization
+ Global Dedupe
+ Archiving to disk, tape, NAS, and SAN
+ and that’s just the beginning!
Thank you for the great review! We definitely appreciate your feedback.
My 2 cents: Veeam Backup & Replication is good value compared to pretty much everything else. Usually people don’t realize how many indirect saving they get through this product. For example, built-in deduplication results is 3-4 times less backup storage required. It’s difficult to imagine a company willing to pay for quadrupling its backup storage to achieve the required retention policy with other products.
Please let me know if any questions about Veeam products will appear or you will need any assistance.
p.s. just in case: you can download Veeam Backup & Replication here – http://www.veeam.com/vm-backup-recovery-replication-software.html
Hi,
Interesting take on Veeam, I never thought in this way, they really increased prices, I would like to know what improved over the years in Standard version since price increased so much.
Would you know where could I find Nakivo trade in information?
I will tial Nakivo and Unitrends.
They both seem like a good product.
Veeam reclassified critical bugs of VBR7 into non-critical?
I argue about this with Veeam’s VP A.Gostev, an architect of VBR7
I’ve collected bug reports on the most critical issues of VBR7 in my blog.
Hello
I really dont understand your comment about Unitrends. Could you please explain?
“Unitrends (only good things about them, they have good promotions from time to time)”
I have evaluated Unitrends for some time and I’m also very familiar with Veeam. But I must say I would go with Unitrends before Veeam any time, I would even prefer their hardware appliances rather than their virtual appliances.
I believe that backup should be completely separated from production.
Hi Nico,
I am glad you find Unitrends to your liking. They are good, being HW or SW appliance.
Now, let me explain, if you buy Unitrends now, you will pay for the product from the price list.
But, I remember two occasions when they had promotions (pricing):
1st was trade in promotion (if your existing backup solution was Symantec or 2 other vendors you were able to trade in your licences and got a hefty discount)
2nd was at the of the year (one or two years ago) when they offered 50% discount on your purchase.
I don’t remember if it was one or two years ago, sorry.
From my experiences they do max for the customer so I think it’s possible to get customer tailored pricing. All the friends that I recommended them to, said their sales team rock.
As for future promotions I have no clue, they say they grow like weed (i really hope that is the case – hint – smoke)
From all the vendors not only backup, I noticed that once they reach a point when they grow like a weed – they also change their core values, Veeam being example where pricing grows like weed. If VC demand to earn some money then I guess that is the case, was never on the other side.
That’s why I also can’t say if there will be future promotions, from unknown company they are now recognised around the world, they are opening offices in Europe and god knows where. But I hope they do come up with promotions at least one ore two.
Speaking of promotions, I think they have one now, its valid until end of October 2013 and you could save up to 50%
Ok, thanks for the clarification about the statement. I thought you meant that the only thing good with Unitrends is their pricing.
I’m totally thrilled about Unitrends and thier appliances. Upgrades and all are so simple, no need to worry about the OS it is running on nor the SQL version.
Since I have been working with many other backup softwares, I actually find Veeam one of them more incomplete backup softwares on the market. I rather call it a DR software for virtual environment with the ability to do restore.
If I need a backup software I choose a software/solution that do this well, If I need a DR/HA software I choose a software/solution that do this well. I will definitely not choose a software/solution that is neither good or bad on both. So with that said, my choices are Unitrends for backup/recovery and for DR/HA my choice is Zerto.
So with this said I would not consider Veeam complete backup solution, in fact if you need to backup a single file you actually need to backup the complete VM (or at least not to my knowledge) I would say that this is really disturbing.
So the conlusion Vis that eeam is very costly both when it comes to licensing but also storage.
Just be 100% right on your order. They have a non cancellation policy which is very unflexible and can leave you up a creek without a paddle if you make any mistakes.
Interesting info. Thanks for putting this together, Erik. These are all great solutions, but check out Paragon Protect & Restore VM Edition. We offer a very effective solution, based on our “arguably most easy-to-use” product (according to CRN), lowest TCO, best-of-class tech support (all US-based, true engineers), and 20 years of BDR experience. Get an EVAL copy at http://www.protect-restore.com or email me at daniel.eickhoff@paragon-software.com
Veeam tends to run fine for us for about 5-6 backups, then comes one of those wonderful “Veeam” errors that more often than not require a ticket with their support, for which you pay handsomely.
We have used it for a year, and decided just recently that we are looking for another solution. When it works it’s great, but it doesn’t work too often for our tastes, and we have a boilerplate VM hosting set up with minimal configuration variances.
Thanks for the shout out to Altaro! We know there are many contenders in the backup space, and we’re grateful for the support!
If you or any of your readers are interested, we do have a full featured 30-day trial and after that our solution is free for 2 VMs, forever! We’ve recently added support for VMware based workloads into our product and also include the usual things such as deduplication and encryption. We also have a number of other useful features such as:
– Granular Exchange Item level and File level restores
– Offsite backup with WAN Accelleration
– Schedulable sandbox verification features to make sure backups are restorable.
A full list of features can be found here: http://www.altaro.com/vm-backup/features.php
I also like to mention that we focus on SMBs and SMEs, provide very competitive pricing, and are licensed per host and not per socket or core, so load that host up with VMs! There aren’t any additional licensing costs from us until you put another host into place!
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! I’m always glad to help!