Unitrends and Veeam: Pricing

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Death, Taxes and Veeam Price Increases

Pricing was going to be the last blog in our Unitrends and Veeam Blog Series. However, with Veeam’s upcoming price increase in January 2016 looming, we thought it would be worth bumping it up on the list. Given the subheading – and some good public materials out there such as this blog from ITSMdaily – you can see that Veeam customers face price increases on a regular basis.

In the end, this is not about just flashing up some pricing and saying we are less. Both companies have software pricing readily available on their websites, so it is pretty easy to get your hands on it and compare. What I hope you can gain here is a better understanding of how the two companies approach pricing from the customer’s perspective.

First, let’s get an easy one out of the way – pricing for cloud services.

As you can see from our blog about Unitrends and Veeam Cloud, Veeam has no cloud pricing. Veeam has no cloud.

Unitrends on the other hand has cloud backup storage for long-term retention in our Forever Cloud that costs ten cents per GB per month (sounds high versus AWS or Google, but it’s actually cheaper if you read this analysis) with no charge for retention. When you are getting offsite cloud backup storage with a grandfather-father-son (GFS) retention policy that keeps an infinite number of yearly backups, it is pretty valuable not to pay for the storage used by retention, bandwidth, recoveries, and other hidden fees you normally see from cloud providers.

By the way, Unitrends Forever Cloud actually allows customers to leverage our DRaaS service for free now, which gives you the ability to failover into the Unitrends Cloud.

There are more cloud options from Unitrends, but given that Veeam has no option, I’ll leave the full cloud story to other sources of information linked above, as well as the Cloud Solutions section of our website.

How does Veeam’s backup appliance pricing fare next to Unitrends Recovery Series?

This is another easy one.  They do not have physical appliances.  Unitrends appears to have the edge there, as well.

Okay…let me stop picking on things Veeam cannot provide a price for and look at how the two companies price their backup software.

Unitrends Enterprise Backup software has four paid editions, and you can see more details here on our website.

Veeam actually has nine (9) paid options just for backup software. They have three editions – Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. They also have three versions of their backup product:

  • Essentials for small businesses (includes Veeam ONE and allows a maximum of 6 sockets to be purchased)
  • Veeam Backup and Replication
  • Veeam Availability Suite (includes Veeam ONE with the ability to purchase unlimited sockets)

I would try to give a nice simple picture that shows the functionality of each option, but that would get highly complex so I’ll simply show you this visual from their website:

veeam price increase details

 

So how do you compare price and functionality? Let me call out a few key points that are important for anyone putting together a continuity strategy with backup and disaster recovery software.

WAN Optimization (aka Good Replication)

Getting data offsite requires a number of advanced technologies to reduce bandwidth usage and increase connection reliability and security. Veeam markets their “good replication” as WAN acceleration, and you must pay for Enterprise Plus in order to get it.

Unitrends has this built into its Standard edition for offsite backup copies. Additionally, even the Essentials edition of Unitrends Enterprise Backup has this capability built in when using the Unitrends Cloud as your offsite target. See this blog for more information on WAN optimization.

This option alone could mean up to 80% savings with Unitrends Enterprise Backup.

Protection and Compliance Reporting

Reducing the cost of management is a key element of the total cost of ownership related to your backup product. Being able to quickly assess risk and take action is critical. Veeam has very little built-in reporting in Veeam Backup and Replication. To get decent dashboards and reports regarding your backup infrastructure, you need to purchase Veeam ONE in the Essentials or Availability Suites. This is a separate product with a separate interface, just to report on backups.

Meanwhile, every single edition of Unitrends Enterprise Backup (including Unitrends Free) has powerful, yet simple dashboards and reports that help you quickly identify failures, trends, unprotected machines, storage issues, etc.

SMB Pricing Limits

Both Unitrends and Veeam have an Essentials set of options that provide low-cost pricing. Veeam restricts its Essentials licensing to a six-socket maximum, in similar fashion as VMware does with vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus.

Unitrends can protect both physical and virtual environments. Therefore, to account for that fact, we allow up to ten resources (any combination of socket or physical server licenses) within our Essentials edition, which is priced very aggressively to help small businesses gain full continuity on a tight budget.

If you need between seven and ten sockets, you can find yourself paying between 160% – 720% percent MORE for Veeam.

24×7 Support

All Unitrends software pricing that you’ve seen here includes the first year of support, which has 24×7 coverage. All Veeam pricing includes basic support, which only covers 8am – 8pm on weekdays.

It is easy to overlook, but support is one of the most critical offerings of a vendor, especially a vendor who helps you stay up and running in a disaster. Therefore, it is always good to make sure you consider what your support coverage will be for the price you are paying.

Hopefully this insight into the pricing approaches of Unitrends and Veeam offers you some help in how to properly assess what you get and what you pay for between the products.

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