Things to consider before moving to Veeam Backup & Replication

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.

1. Revealing feature one by one,
2. Price increase,
3. Notifying customers that there will be price increase for standard and enterprise,
4. Revealing new Enterprise plus edition which costs more,
5. 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 🙂 .