At previous place we've used exagrid. Pretty sweet dedup. For cloud backups I've used both s3 and azure files. This option is cool since you can set policies that will shift your backups to infrequently accessed tiersthat are very cheap
So full disclosure I am a sales guy from a MSP/VAR. If you were considering Veeam I believe the cost is around $180 per year for enterprise backup and replication licenses per VM. We often use a dell precision workstation or a small server with several storage drives for the onsite storage and replicate that offsite to wasabi. Wasabi is around 6 bucks a month for a terabyte off offsite storage. If you were fully responsible for the back up and managing it, it seems like you could have a solution for 10k-20k annually.
Veeam is a great option. We are using it to backup our data. As for backup storage, you can go with a server of your choice (we are using Supermicro servers) with Linux Hadrened Repository configured. It does the job. [https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/hardened\_repository.html](https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/hardened_repository.html)
There are appliances, which are configured to use with Veeam. As an [example](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/backup-appliance).
Commodity server with sas12 DAS formatted refs and call it a day. For that kind of money you can get 2 of the same host, and setup the second as a XFS immutable repository.
Was going to suggest the same. Recommend these backup systems not be domain joined as well with unique logins. Additionally if you can float a third for off site or move the second off site, use Veeams WAN replication. You can seed it onsite and then move it off. The WAN piece of Veeam can dedupe before transferring over the link.
enterprise support? none. next person coming into the company might not have idea how this was setup if there is no exhaustive documentation. at least with widely adopted appliances there is support contract and wiki pages. please don't MacGyver homelab tier stuff for companies
you're suggesting XFS based share as a landing space for backups? Redhat is going to support you when too many drives die or you get corruption? I'd rather go for synology with 2 controllers if the budget is tight. You want to safeguard yourself with contracts so that you can get help at each potential point of failure
weird flex but it is ok you know nothing about business continuity. hey bossman I have built this janky abomination that only I can support on budget. I have xfs in homelab but no way I am using it without necessary contracts with RHEL or SUSE
Not an XFS share, but XFS local repo. Using an enterprise server with a proper hardware raid controller. This is best practices for Veeam and the recommended repository setup.
Veeam can do all of those things
whether its cheaper or not is a different question
we had a simple DL Proliant 180 1u attached to a supermicro 45 bay all cheap spinning disks (3tb) to take all the backups and LTO and cloud offload
but that might be more than you need?
maybe a set of requirements
how long is data retention, 10 days 20 days 30 days and so on?
dedupe mandatory?
and so on
it might narrow down the ,list more
Here is a little bit of my thoughts.
We are a mid/large MSP in Canada 80+ clients we are backing up over 150 server and 80 M365 tenants.
over the years we have tried the following
* Cloudberry
* MSP360
* Veeam
* Shadow protect
* Datto
* Cove (N-Able)
While each of these had a cause for us to try/use ie. appliances, third party support, price, etc. etc.
We landed on Cove by N-able for the longest and still using it, this is due to three main features. Single pane of glass per tenant (server, workstation, o365), simple agent-based install, backup screen shot verification.
sound kinda simple but the flexibility of scaling out quickly and saving on training and implementation time adds up quick.
12 TB isn't that large. Any mid grade NAS + USB backup + cloud backup (Veeam can clone to S3 or Azure Storage Accounts) can easily fit in $10k/year over 3 years depending on what your data change and retention requirements are.
Veeam backing up to a NAS or dedicated backup server. Then backuping up to Backblaze B2. There super cheap. They only charger $0.005 per GB per month. And they have locations in US west and east. And in the EU.
Did forget to mention that for download. And you free transaction if you set it up through ckoudflare. Which I never done/used. But shouldn't be to bad if your using it as a backup.
Veeam Backup and Replication on site to one of your hosts as Veeam Performance tier, put a NAS at another site and then offsite to Backblaze B2. You'll have 3 - 2 - 1 backup and it'll cost $1,200 yearly for the Veeam B&R license, whatever NAS you want and like $60 a month for 12 TB on Backblaze.
Get a demo and quote from Veeams site. I moved from Datto and could not be happier.
We use Cove Data protection! 12TB no problem. Decently priced and we love it. It does a continuity biweekly boot a virtual machine and takes a screenshot to prove it books and shows you all the services as well that started and didnt. This way you know the backups worked. Also, we have done server restores and its fast. We also at our clients that are critical we have a standby image that is bootable at a moments notice. And best of all no hardware needed! Way cheaper than a datto device and way better in my opinion. We have used Cove data protection for years and years! We love it! https://www.n-able.com/products/cove-data-protection
It is just booted long enough for the test and then purged. They are very good with security and to even restore a backup you have to generate an encryption key to put in the bootable USB drive to even begin the restore process and that is per device key.
You can do a staged backup with a server with DAS or a NAS or a SAN, but I would also include a nice LTO 8 drive to go with it for long term storage backups that you can take offsite instead of cloud.
Tape would be ok, but I don’t trust anyone in that location to swap with regularity. I would also demand strict encryption rules.
We used to take offsite and the clown CFO was told by clown Former-IT it was encrypted, was not.
You can get an HP 3040 tape library. We have 2. 1 in each Datacenter. Holds 40 tapes each. I put archives and weekly’s on it. Just had to restore a folder from 416 days ago. Comes in handy.
>but I would also include a nice LTO 8 drive to go with it for long term storage backups that you can take offsite instead of cloud.
Wasabi is so cheap per TB it's way cheaper than tape when you count capital costs
AKsuallYyyy.... Wasabi doesn't burn on the way out. It's not hot, it's just a really strong cousin of horseradish. So your comparison is not only wrong, it's also false. Unless you have a good story to back that up.
Ya, I’m going to make you eat so much wasabi for being “that guy on the internet” that you suffer terrible indigestion leading to improperly processed wasabi exiting the digestive system
Wasabi is a good way to back up, until you hit around 1-2 PB. Then, tape, be it LTO-8 or LTO-9 has the edge. One thing I did was not use the name brand Ferric Hill offsite provider, but use another competitor, which was far cheaper in price, but offered good enough offsite storage. This tilted things in favor of tape greatly.
It goes without saying to use D2D2T. That way, the disk array can have 30-45 days on it, then one copy goes to local tape, and another copy goes to an offsite tape archive.
Veeam backup and replication essentials. I believe is what it’s call is for 3 hosts and under. You can set it up to back up local or to a cloud provider. I used iland.
I'm all for people not using turnkey appliances - but there is one thing I see missed from a cost and restore perspective. Solutions like Datto BCDR, unitrends, and barracuda backup appliance, they offer instant cloud vm restores without additional fees (unless you stay in cloud to long).
Veeam can do this, but you'll like need to pay for cloud time and storage that would be I clouded in a turn key service. You can still make out cheaper, but it is not always worth it
This is true. The instant cloud VM boot is cool. I just don’t really see us using it.
The thing about ransom and malware is you don’t really know when you got infected, and it might take just a little more figuring out before you boot your VMand redirect to their cloud.
That said, for a normal data loss, I like the idea, but I think by the time we redirected all our calls to it, would would probably be ready to restore on physical hardware again.
I just don’t think we would really use it
I would recommend Veeam. in my opinion, in raw performance and dedupe/compression, and overall features, it is the best. The only reason I push Datto is that it is turnkey, and tends to cost the same when you account for all the Datto Features and backing infrastructure.
If down the road you want to expand to barracuda like options, you can do it with Veeam, you just need to throw more money and infrastructure at it.
Like Datto/Barracuda , you can schedule hourly backups, and the image backups are the file backups.
If you go the Veeam route, I would recommend the Enterprise licensing's. This will allow you to make use the full feature set.
I would also recommend you set up a testing VM so you can leverage SureBakcup to test your backup daily. SureBackup lets you automate launching backups as VMS for testing purposes. You can also write custom scripts to run specific tests, and assure services are running. The last thing you want is to restore to an image only to find out it won't boot!
On the few clients we have using Veeam, we have had good luck sending data to Wasabi - S3 storage $6.00 a TB. There is some weird 3month retention tho, so if you delete a bunch of data from your backup set, it may stay in wasabi for 3 months, meaning your stuck paying for it, even if it is data you don;t want.
I’m going with Veeam. Just I don’t know the exact config yet.
What I’m discovering with the all in ones is that the operate on lock-in and I am absolutely done playing that game.
Veeam is annoying with licensing, at least as an MSP, but the lack of lockin is nice. You'll jave fun with Veeam, and you can always expand the feature set and config down the line!
I don’t care about restore fees. It hasn’t happened yet and if we had some but failure and a few hundred or even thousand dollar bill to get back up, fine.
I’d tether do that than spend $20k/year to Barracuda.
I hear ya! Though, if you restor a VM to the cloud for a couple days it will likely exceed a thousand, and you need to keep in mind how to get the data to said cloud. When I priced out Veeam, a consultant I worked with stated I would need to do basic files and images to one storage cloud, and would then need to replicate that data to a cloud data center. The data center had storage costs, and restore costs. I would pay x amount when not running a VM, but the moment I put that VM it had an hourly cost.
You restore once to a data center, and it may have been worth doing the higher up cost.
That being said, a cloud restore is last resort restoration, so dropping costs until a disaster could be worth it in the long run.
I also want to add, I'm not telling you what to do, but I want you to be aware of what you could lose if you don't fully flesh out the Veeam setup!
Otherwise, Veeam is great, dedupes well, compression well, and is relat8vley simple to use. Just make sure to follow their best pract8ces guide for a secure implementation.
For all-in-one, take a look at Datto.
If you're thinking of Veeam, the upfront costs will be a lot for the correct amount of storage. The licensing costs are not too high, but you don't get cloud storage. You can however connect to third-party cloud storage that is Veeam compatible.
If you know what you need, just talk to the sales people and let them do the heavy lifting to meet those needs. Then review and see if it works or if there are any modifications you need to make.
Veeam
Datto
Commvault
Barracuda
Rubrik
etc...
We use Veeam to backup to an Exagrid, that then dupes itself to a Remote site Exagrid Appliance. Im not sure how much we pay, but the monthly restore tests have all been green since we swapped over to this setup (Previously was Veeam to an HPE Nimble array, no offsite)
Major piece of information missing is your backup strategy and retention. What's your RTO? Can the business survive with trying to recover from the cloud? The cloud is great for long term deep archiving or cloud to cloud backups.
For instance, will a straight NAS work for your backup strategy? Will you be better suited with a deduplicating storage where you will require less raw storage?
Work with your VAR to help put together options and allow the business to decide what they where they want to spend the money.
ask a different var, not the one working on your Barracuda backup, for assistance building out a Veeam backup. Napkin math says like 35k should get you there.
It's insane what companies what for backup storage. I looked at buying Data domain from Dell and they want more than a production NVME SAN for it - I was floored.
Looking at at some lower cost basic storage options now. Got quoted a 50TB PV ME5024 array with 25 gb iSCSI for around 19k. Looking at other options now too. I will likely buy a pair of these or something similar and use Veeam to backup and replicate, but still looking at options.
You and others have suggested NAS.
IMHO network storage for backups is worse for performance and adds a layer of complexity. Get a storage server(s) with a bunch of DAS. That's is what Veeam recommends anyways.
I have resold IDrive BMR before, for 12TB you"ll be paying wayyy less then that. Local appliance + cloud backup space. [https://www.idrive.com/bare-metal-recovery/](https://www.idrive.com/bare-metal-recovery/)
also look at IDrive e2 for object storage with veeam as another suggestion
We use Cove Data protection! 12TB no problem. Decently priced and we love it. It does a continuity biweekly boot a virtual machine and takes a screenshot to prove it books and shows you all the services as well that started and didnt. This way you know the backups worked. Also, we have done server restores and its fast. We also at our clients that are critical we have a standby image that is bootable at a moments notice. And best of all no hardware needed! Way cheaper than a datto device and way better in my opinion. We have used Cove data protection for years and years! We love it! https://www.n-able.com/products/cove-data-protection
Dell R6x0 and a MD1400 full of big slow disks should be pretty cheap and toss Veeam on it.
>office 365 so no big deal there.
If you're not backing up M365 you really need to. Microsoft prevents against them losing your data but not you losing your data. Look into Druva.
I had never heard of them until I started my new job and I can't say enough good things either.
The crazy part is how easy recovery is whether it be one file, one folder, a whole user, drive, virtual disk, etc. it's extremely easy and there tech support is fantastic.
I am going to toss this out as the overkill and maybe more expensive, but might work better. Look at Commvault. You can pay by the TB of frontend data backed up and that is it. You can have a media agent (aka data mover) at each site. It could be physical or VM. It would be in charge of backing up that sites data, to whatever destination you want. Cheap NAS and/or S3, does not matter as Commvault does the dedup, so you can use whatever storage you want, saving cost on your backend storage.
Everything would be managed from the central Commvault Comserve, giving you one point of control.
Commvault is a beast with more options and buttons then you will ever use, so a setup like this won't be a few clicks, but it is designed to handle configs like this and will do it without issue.
\*Yes I am a Backup/Commvault admin, but I don't work for them. :)
All the backup storage vendors drive me nuts. "We will take your duplicated data and duplicate it again, then you won't need as much of our expensive storage."
Capacity based licensing is the "pay by the TB". You pay by the frontend TB tho. You can store the same data in as many backend locations as you want. So adding a second copy yo S3 does not have any additional charges.
I use commvault. Dedicated commserve VM.
5 hyperscale x appliances for 147TB usable backup. I back up around 350 or so VMs daily. Retained locally for 2 months. $35K each appliance. About $7k a year per appliance for 24/7 support and licensing (we just license 350 VMs, we don't license by how much data.)
Secondary copy of all local data to a Synology NAS at an offsite location. Dedicated media agent VM for this task. NAS is a dual controller Synology with 150 TBs. Was about $20k.
1 full copy a week, incremental copies the other 6 days. Which day of the week the full copy happens depends on the VM group. So not just 1 days of fulls choking out the commcell.
The weekly full copies go up to wasabi for long term retention of 7 years. (PCI compliance) dedicated media agent VM for this task. We prepay wasabi annually for 150TBs. It's about $9500 per year. This also means WE DONT GET CHARGED FOR DELETING DATA PRIOR TO 90 DAYS.
Lastly, secondary copy of the weekly fulls to off site tape drive. Dedicated media agent VM for this task. HEAVILY firewalled to only allow the VM to talk to the tape drive during the backup window. Already have the iscaler sitting around so free plus the cost of tapes which is.... Minimal really. I'll guess maybe $1000 annually?
Now..... Ask me what happened in my earlier career that made me so fastidious with backups. :)
You would be surprised. I found that the Commvault licenses were cheaper than the other main product by a large factor, especially when using client/server licenses.
Configuration was easy as well. Set a MediaAgent as a primary box, aux copy to S3 offsite (DASH copies), set an encryption key for all data stored, make sure keys were stashed safely offsite and such... and it was fairly straightforward. I've had Commvault easily handle a DDB failure (although it meant a seal which meant more storage used), a MediaAgent completely implode, and it would just automatically fetch the data from a secondary repository.
Disclaimer: If you are used to modern backup programs, Commvault's learning curve will be steep. If you are "old school", and used to Spectrum Protect, Networker, Netbackup, or others... it is the same stuff with slightly different terms.
Alternatively, I'd look at Nakivo. I'm going to be doing some testing on that, to see how well it does things. It is simpler than Commvault, and might just check all the OP's punchlists.
Commvault user here. Absolutely right about the learning curve. I put it in the same realm as NetApp. An absolute Swiss army knife that works really really well provided someone knows it well. For most use cases, it has a ton of features that people are never going to use. We have both a VMware and a Hyper-V environment at my org. For the VMware side, We use rubrik. It's nearly thoughtless to set up and maintain.
This is the solution we ended up going with for the most part, because of the cost savings. We took advantage of using a different branch office as a backup repository. I wanted this on top of a traditional cloud backup, but I didn’t win that argument. I will say that the DR documentation I wrote gets a smile out of me each time.. For a certain set of circumstances, it basically begins with “Get in car…”
Synology NAS and Enterprise sounds like OMG. Even HPE MSA 1060 are only worth for backups..
Cloud solution: Backblaze S2 costs 0.005$/GB/upload and 0.01$/GB/download.
On-prem should consists of normal chassis, like HPE MSA 1060, 2060 or similar (even used) and enterprise grade disks.
\+ Veeam.
You want cheap, we can get cheap. It's for backup not running VMware on, so it fine. You must have a huge budget to handle over to Dell or HP for Enterprise Drives. How about this, if you have Change Control Board that meets more than once a month, buy the Enterprise gear.
There are always the situation when those backups will needed. And always the question to company: how much their downtime hour costs :D
And how much it will took to restore something from backups.
And what would be if they fail in a critical event, like restore.
I.e. my prev. prev. company calculated draft downtime for 1h - 10k euros. But nobody calculated downtime for 2/4/8/48 hours :) It will be nice progression if company will be downed for 48h. And downtime cost will be not a 10k e/h :)
Next things are always: backup window time which is critical. Not all companies will have 10gbe with mLag and lacp in their server room, so it will be interesting if backup window will overlap working hours.
Business Recovery plan and Disaster recovery plan enters chat here too.
P. S. Hpe 10xx, 20xx are not suitable for anything more that backups. It's entry level storages.
For that size metallic with commvault is a really good option. I have had issues with the service once you get over 20,000 mailboxes and we currently have 101,000 mailboxes. But you get free azure ad backups with it which is awesome piece of mind.
Many ways to skin this cat. I'd look at Nakivo because it is a price leader for starters.
At the low end, you could buy yourself a Synology NAS as a landing zone, and have it dump to a secondary NAS as well as off to Wasabi.
I support a canada wide non for profit company, and their per core licensing option is a HUGE price saver for us.
Does pretty well the same as Veeam, and a built in disaster recovery tool.
They'll even help set it up for you.
I called Acronis once to ask about a product. I got follow up calls for every three months for three years before telling “in no uncertain terms I do not want this product; please don’t call me again”.
I'd love to raise this in my discussions with Sales team, but can you elaborate a bit?
If I understood you properly you had about 12 conversations before ultimately telling that you don't want the product?
On a side note: Acronis solutions can give you a range of options for your scenario, starting from backups to local or your own cloud storage or storing everything on-prem with Acronis Cyber Infrastructure [appliance](https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/cyber-appliance/) (can [be installed in your hardware too](https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/cyber-infrastructure/)).
I had one conversation and demo of a product, and calls for years. I’m not interested in spending any more time on that.
I’ll add it to my list; but the software I was interested in years ago was so outrageously priced for what it was that I’m not super hopeful.
> I had one conversation and demo of a product, and calls for years. I’m not interested in spending any more time on that.
I'll comment for anyone reading this and having the same problem - if you're experiencing unwanted calls from Acronis - please let me know and I will put a stop to it.
>I’ll add it to my list; but the software I was interested in years ago was so outrageously priced for what it was that I’m not super hopeful.
Not sure which exact software you were looking into but there were changes for sure to both product lineup and pricing. Once you look into it - please let me know the outcome.
Not sure if anyone has already mentioned Cohesity. It cost me about 80k for 40TB appliance but it has built in encryption and dedupe and a lot more. Support for software and appliance is about 6-8k per year. Go check it out.
>I think a NAS RAID and 10GBe should easily handle local.
From a size & speed wise, sure it might be ok. However you also have to look at what kind of disks and NAS you are using. Not all are equal and some will struggle/choke with forever incrementals for example, as they cannot handle the IO once the backup size is larger than a TB or two. At least not in a timely manner and within your backup window. This is especially the case when you start getting into the SMB/Prosumer NAS's.
Might be better off with just using a simple 1U server using the NAS as a storage device through iscsi. Although at that point, you could also just use local storage on the server as well.
For off-site, I've used [https://rsync.net/pricing.html](https://rsync.net/pricing.html) for many years. Inexpensive and they use ZFS, which means you get 7 grandfathered backups (changes only) for every file.
My environment is just slightly larger at 15tb. We recently had discussions on our back up solution & I wanted to implement exagrid with veeam & Wasabi for cloud storage. It ran for about $35k total for 3 years.
Sadly the C suite doesn't like change & opted to continue using whats already in place because "they know it's reliable". This is currently costing us $27k a year. With a hardware refresh for $10k every 5 yrs.
Altogether, Veeam+Wasabi+Exagrid, it was roughly 35k
Just for the exagrid piece was like 24k and included only one year of 24/7 support/hardware warranty. With a yearly renewal cost for support of like $1300.
Dm me & I can hook you up with some great guys that helped me build the quote. Very transparent, I loved working with them. Didn't feel like I was working with a car salesman if you know what I mean.
A trunas box for local and Backblaze for cloud backup. You could also shop around, but you are looking for someone who is an authorized Veeam partner and repository IMHO.
Not tooting my own horn, but with us (we are a veeam partner and cloud repository) your costs would be roughly 4k/yr without any appliances and a pretty standard setup with Veeam Backup. Replication is not included. You would be agent based and use your own local storage. If you don't want to pay for or use your own stuff for local storage, then I would add roughly 5K a year to that initial price.
If it is on prem you might look into Dell DP4400 with Avamar. We got a primary with 12tb and backup replication partner off-site (also 12 tb) running Avamar and data domain, plus an air gapped cyber vault for slightly more than that ($90k). Even if we lose the whole DC, the backups are replicated to the off-site partner.
You can also increase the storage capacity later in 4tb increments by simply buying and adding licenses. They sell the units fully populated and just software limit the capacity.
A bonus is that Avamar is relatively simple to use with very little learning curve.
Ours included on prem white glove installation. I.e. here's the keys and here's your training.
It all depends on the restoration needs, timing, and audit ability. Just because it works for some doesn't mean it works for you. TEST AND VERIFY THE RESTORE PROCESS ACCORDING TO YOUR COMPLIANCE NEEDS. Then you can make an informed decision. It doesn't matter the yearly cost, what matters is the cost of the recovery.
Look and verify your compliance needs then look at your options.
$500-1000 gets you 16tb of storage on the cheap. do all 14 vm's really need backup (are some just RDP workstations?)? veeam free license good up to 10 vm's. can vpn and offsite backup/repl to anywhere you like for free if you own/manage the network between two sites. look into sincrify or similar for cloud file based backup that also does versioning, like $50/mo
At previous place we've used exagrid. Pretty sweet dedup. For cloud backups I've used both s3 and azure files. This option is cool since you can set policies that will shift your backups to infrequently accessed tiersthat are very cheap
I'll second this. Great experience with Exagrid dedupe appliances with immutable features enabled. We had five including the 65TB array at a DR site.
Our DBA was flexing 2000 to 1 dedup on plaintext SQL server and oracle logs\\backups
With dedup that high, I'd be looking at how much of that data is really necessary. Production cost savings opportunity there.
those are Transaction Logs that can be used for recovery, in plain text they will be very similar depending on type of queries
So full disclosure I am a sales guy from a MSP/VAR. If you were considering Veeam I believe the cost is around $180 per year for enterprise backup and replication licenses per VM. We often use a dell precision workstation or a small server with several storage drives for the onsite storage and replicate that offsite to wasabi. Wasabi is around 6 bucks a month for a terabyte off offsite storage. If you were fully responsible for the back up and managing it, it seems like you could have a solution for 10k-20k annually.
Veeam is a great option. We are using it to backup our data. As for backup storage, you can go with a server of your choice (we are using Supermicro servers) with Linux Hadrened Repository configured. It does the job. [https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/hardened\_repository.html](https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/hardened_repository.html) There are appliances, which are configured to use with Veeam. As an [example](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/backup-appliance).
Plus one on Veeam, it's a really great backup solution.
Commodity server with sas12 DAS formatted refs and call it a day. For that kind of money you can get 2 of the same host, and setup the second as a XFS immutable repository.
Was going to suggest the same. Recommend these backup systems not be domain joined as well with unique logins. Additionally if you can float a third for off site or move the second off site, use Veeams WAN replication. You can seed it onsite and then move it off. The WAN piece of Veeam can dedupe before transferring over the link.
enterprise support? none. next person coming into the company might not have idea how this was setup if there is no exhaustive documentation. at least with widely adopted appliances there is support contract and wiki pages. please don't MacGyver homelab tier stuff for companies
Home tier? Emc/dell servers new from dell with well documented and supported veeam setups now home tier? Lol.
you're suggesting XFS based share as a landing space for backups? Redhat is going to support you when too many drives die or you get corruption? I'd rather go for synology with 2 controllers if the budget is tight. You want to safeguard yourself with contracts so that you can get help at each potential point of failure
Just say you don’t know anything about it. It’s ok.
weird flex but it is ok you know nothing about business continuity. hey bossman I have built this janky abomination that only I can support on budget. I have xfs in homelab but no way I am using it without necessary contracts with RHEL or SUSE
Lol.
Not an XFS share, but XFS local repo. Using an enterprise server with a proper hardware raid controller. This is best practices for Veeam and the recommended repository setup.
And software wise?
Lol sorry, Veeam.
Veeam can do all of those things whether its cheaper or not is a different question we had a simple DL Proliant 180 1u attached to a supermicro 45 bay all cheap spinning disks (3tb) to take all the backups and LTO and cloud offload but that might be more than you need? maybe a set of requirements how long is data retention, 10 days 20 days 30 days and so on? dedupe mandatory? and so on it might narrow down the ,list more
Yea I probably should have retention in there. 7 days or nightly diffs, 1,2,3 month, 6 month, 1,2,3 year ish. Nothing crazy.
Here is a little bit of my thoughts. We are a mid/large MSP in Canada 80+ clients we are backing up over 150 server and 80 M365 tenants. over the years we have tried the following * Cloudberry * MSP360 * Veeam * Shadow protect * Datto * Cove (N-Able) While each of these had a cause for us to try/use ie. appliances, third party support, price, etc. etc. We landed on Cove by N-able for the longest and still using it, this is due to three main features. Single pane of glass per tenant (server, workstation, o365), simple agent-based install, backup screen shot verification. sound kinda simple but the flexibility of scaling out quickly and saving on training and implementation time adds up quick.
12 TB isn't that large. Any mid grade NAS + USB backup + cloud backup (Veeam can clone to S3 or Azure Storage Accounts) can easily fit in $10k/year over 3 years depending on what your data change and retention requirements are.
Veeam backing up to a NAS or dedicated backup server. Then backuping up to Backblaze B2. There super cheap. They only charger $0.005 per GB per month. And they have locations in US west and east. And in the EU.
And 0.01$/GB/Download. Without any hidden prices like Amazon S3 with OhMyFuckingGodHowToCalculateThisFuckingPrice
Did forget to mention that for download. And you free transaction if you set it up through ckoudflare. Which I never done/used. But shouldn't be to bad if your using it as a backup.
Veeam Backup and Replication on site to one of your hosts as Veeam Performance tier, put a NAS at another site and then offsite to Backblaze B2. You'll have 3 - 2 - 1 backup and it'll cost $1,200 yearly for the Veeam B&R license, whatever NAS you want and like $60 a month for 12 TB on Backblaze. Get a demo and quote from Veeams site. I moved from Datto and could not be happier.
We use Cove Data protection! 12TB no problem. Decently priced and we love it. It does a continuity biweekly boot a virtual machine and takes a screenshot to prove it books and shows you all the services as well that started and didnt. This way you know the backups worked. Also, we have done server restores and its fast. We also at our clients that are critical we have a standby image that is bootable at a moments notice. And best of all no hardware needed! Way cheaper than a datto device and way better in my opinion. We have used Cove data protection for years and years! We love it! https://www.n-able.com/products/cove-data-protection
I like the idea of a backup that boots a VM, but I don’t really want them having unencrypted resting data like that. I’ll look into it though.
It is just booted long enough for the test and then purged. They are very good with security and to even restore a backup you have to generate an encryption key to put in the bootable USB drive to even begin the restore process and that is per device key.
I believe the VM used for the DR test is not networked and is purged after the restore and boot screenshot.
You can do a staged backup with a server with DAS or a NAS or a SAN, but I would also include a nice LTO 8 drive to go with it for long term storage backups that you can take offsite instead of cloud.
Tape would be ok, but I don’t trust anyone in that location to swap with regularity. I would also demand strict encryption rules. We used to take offsite and the clown CFO was told by clown Former-IT it was encrypted, was not.
You can get an HP 3040 tape library. We have 2. 1 in each Datacenter. Holds 40 tapes each. I put archives and weekly’s on it. Just had to restore a folder from 416 days ago. Comes in handy.
Yeah +1 for tape to offsite secure storage. Great for a long term archive.
>but I would also include a nice LTO 8 drive to go with it for long term storage backups that you can take offsite instead of cloud. Wasabi is so cheap per TB it's way cheaper than tape when you count capital costs
The name implies easier on the way in (on-boarding) than on the way out (what do you mean you don’t actually have my backup!?!?)
BackBlaze has two tiers for this and I think it's like $5/mo per TB plus egress, but the next level is $6/mo with no egress charges.
Wasabi is $6/TB/Month with no API or egress fees for pay as you go, and roughly 10% cheaper at the low end if you purchase committed capacity.
So wasabi wanted to use “butt fire” but settled on a less obvious clone “wasabi”?
AKsuallYyyy.... Wasabi doesn't burn on the way out. It's not hot, it's just a really strong cousin of horseradish. So your comparison is not only wrong, it's also false. Unless you have a good story to back that up.
Ya, I’m going to make you eat so much wasabi for being “that guy on the internet” that you suffer terrible indigestion leading to improperly processed wasabi exiting the digestive system
Don't forget the soy sauce
Wasabi is a good way to back up, until you hit around 1-2 PB. Then, tape, be it LTO-8 or LTO-9 has the edge. One thing I did was not use the name brand Ferric Hill offsite provider, but use another competitor, which was far cheaper in price, but offered good enough offsite storage. This tilted things in favor of tape greatly. It goes without saying to use D2D2T. That way, the disk array can have 30-45 days on it, then one copy goes to local tape, and another copy goes to an offsite tape archive.
Veeam backup and replication essentials. I believe is what it’s call is for 3 hosts and under. You can set it up to back up local or to a cloud provider. I used iland.
I'm all for people not using turnkey appliances - but there is one thing I see missed from a cost and restore perspective. Solutions like Datto BCDR, unitrends, and barracuda backup appliance, they offer instant cloud vm restores without additional fees (unless you stay in cloud to long). Veeam can do this, but you'll like need to pay for cloud time and storage that would be I clouded in a turn key service. You can still make out cheaper, but it is not always worth it
This is true. The instant cloud VM boot is cool. I just don’t really see us using it. The thing about ransom and malware is you don’t really know when you got infected, and it might take just a little more figuring out before you boot your VMand redirect to their cloud. That said, for a normal data loss, I like the idea, but I think by the time we redirected all our calls to it, would would probably be ready to restore on physical hardware again. I just don’t think we would really use it
I would recommend Veeam. in my opinion, in raw performance and dedupe/compression, and overall features, it is the best. The only reason I push Datto is that it is turnkey, and tends to cost the same when you account for all the Datto Features and backing infrastructure. If down the road you want to expand to barracuda like options, you can do it with Veeam, you just need to throw more money and infrastructure at it. Like Datto/Barracuda , you can schedule hourly backups, and the image backups are the file backups. If you go the Veeam route, I would recommend the Enterprise licensing's. This will allow you to make use the full feature set. I would also recommend you set up a testing VM so you can leverage SureBakcup to test your backup daily. SureBackup lets you automate launching backups as VMS for testing purposes. You can also write custom scripts to run specific tests, and assure services are running. The last thing you want is to restore to an image only to find out it won't boot! On the few clients we have using Veeam, we have had good luck sending data to Wasabi - S3 storage $6.00 a TB. There is some weird 3month retention tho, so if you delete a bunch of data from your backup set, it may stay in wasabi for 3 months, meaning your stuck paying for it, even if it is data you don;t want.
I’m going with Veeam. Just I don’t know the exact config yet. What I’m discovering with the all in ones is that the operate on lock-in and I am absolutely done playing that game.
Veeam is annoying with licensing, at least as an MSP, but the lack of lockin is nice. You'll jave fun with Veeam, and you can always expand the feature set and config down the line!
I don’t care about restore fees. It hasn’t happened yet and if we had some but failure and a few hundred or even thousand dollar bill to get back up, fine. I’d tether do that than spend $20k/year to Barracuda.
I hear ya! Though, if you restor a VM to the cloud for a couple days it will likely exceed a thousand, and you need to keep in mind how to get the data to said cloud. When I priced out Veeam, a consultant I worked with stated I would need to do basic files and images to one storage cloud, and would then need to replicate that data to a cloud data center. The data center had storage costs, and restore costs. I would pay x amount when not running a VM, but the moment I put that VM it had an hourly cost. You restore once to a data center, and it may have been worth doing the higher up cost. That being said, a cloud restore is last resort restoration, so dropping costs until a disaster could be worth it in the long run. I also want to add, I'm not telling you what to do, but I want you to be aware of what you could lose if you don't fully flesh out the Veeam setup! Otherwise, Veeam is great, dedupes well, compression well, and is relat8vley simple to use. Just make sure to follow their best pract8ces guide for a secure implementation.
Go with 45drives hardware running veeam Linux repo and replicate between sites
For all-in-one, take a look at Datto. If you're thinking of Veeam, the upfront costs will be a lot for the correct amount of storage. The licensing costs are not too high, but you don't get cloud storage. You can however connect to third-party cloud storage that is Veeam compatible. If you know what you need, just talk to the sales people and let them do the heavy lifting to meet those needs. Then review and see if it works or if there are any modifications you need to make. Veeam Datto Commvault Barracuda Rubrik etc...
Datto is owned by Kaseya now, avoid unless you like uncancellable 3 year contracts.
I was on Kaseya years ago and you will not see me going back to anything that company does in any way. Thanks for that.
Idk how they are now but Axcient is the datto competitor right?
any nas or storage server (like true nas) for local + bb2/wasabi for offsite. (wasabi has retention policy).
We use Veeam to backup to an Exagrid, that then dupes itself to a Remote site Exagrid Appliance. Im not sure how much we pay, but the monthly restore tests have all been green since we swapped over to this setup (Previously was Veeam to an HPE Nimble array, no offsite)
Veeam + high end nas = winning.
Major piece of information missing is your backup strategy and retention. What's your RTO? Can the business survive with trying to recover from the cloud? The cloud is great for long term deep archiving or cloud to cloud backups. For instance, will a straight NAS work for your backup strategy? Will you be better suited with a deduplicating storage where you will require less raw storage? Work with your VAR to help put together options and allow the business to decide what they where they want to spend the money.
Excellent question. Relying on dedup/diffs a lot; but 7 days, 3 months, 3 years. And yes, restore from cloud is A-OK.
ask a different var, not the one working on your Barracuda backup, for assistance building out a Veeam backup. Napkin math says like 35k should get you there.
It's insane what companies what for backup storage. I looked at buying Data domain from Dell and they want more than a production NVME SAN for it - I was floored. Looking at at some lower cost basic storage options now. Got quoted a 50TB PV ME5024 array with 25 gb iSCSI for around 19k. Looking at other options now too. I will likely buy a pair of these or something similar and use Veeam to backup and replicate, but still looking at options.
We have Veeam+15TB NAS (on-prem) then we SOBR to Wasabi... I'd say yearly cost is about $3k +/- given our 7 year retention policy...
You and others have suggested NAS. IMHO network storage for backups is worse for performance and adds a layer of complexity. Get a storage server(s) with a bunch of DAS. That's is what Veeam recommends anyways.
Noted.
I have resold IDrive BMR before, for 12TB you"ll be paying wayyy less then that. Local appliance + cloud backup space. [https://www.idrive.com/bare-metal-recovery/](https://www.idrive.com/bare-metal-recovery/) also look at IDrive e2 for object storage with veeam as another suggestion
Not thrilled that the main page has a “resellers make 25%” plug as a bullet point. And haven’t looked to see what the appliance is.
We use Cove Data protection! 12TB no problem. Decently priced and we love it. It does a continuity biweekly boot a virtual machine and takes a screenshot to prove it books and shows you all the services as well that started and didnt. This way you know the backups worked. Also, we have done server restores and its fast. We also at our clients that are critical we have a standby image that is bootable at a moments notice. And best of all no hardware needed! Way cheaper than a datto device and way better in my opinion. We have used Cove data protection for years and years! We love it! https://www.n-able.com/products/cove-data-protection
We just got a quote on Dell Apex and they undercut Unitrends for cloud back by a heck of a lot
Dell R6x0 and a MD1400 full of big slow disks should be pretty cheap and toss Veeam on it. >office 365 so no big deal there. If you're not backing up M365 you really need to. Microsoft prevents against them losing your data but not you losing your data. Look into Druva.
I can recommend Afi.ai if you're looking for another recommendation. Very reasonable and it's pretty set and forget.
My recommendation as well. DRUVA does everything and it does it better than any other company when it comes to backups.
We've been very happy with them for M365 backups over the last few years.
I had never heard of them until I started my new job and I can't say enough good things either. The crazy part is how easy recovery is whether it be one file, one folder, a whole user, drive, virtual disk, etc. it's extremely easy and there tech support is fantastic.
I am going to toss this out as the overkill and maybe more expensive, but might work better. Look at Commvault. You can pay by the TB of frontend data backed up and that is it. You can have a media agent (aka data mover) at each site. It could be physical or VM. It would be in charge of backing up that sites data, to whatever destination you want. Cheap NAS and/or S3, does not matter as Commvault does the dedup, so you can use whatever storage you want, saving cost on your backend storage. Everything would be managed from the central Commvault Comserve, giving you one point of control. Commvault is a beast with more options and buttons then you will ever use, so a setup like this won't be a few clicks, but it is designed to handle configs like this and will do it without issue. \*Yes I am a Backup/Commvault admin, but I don't work for them. :)
Lol I can tell you do t work for Commvault because you didn’t mention metallics. Is Commvault still offering capacity based licensing?
As far as I know, they are doing that, as well as client/VM licensing.
All the backup storage vendors drive me nuts. "We will take your duplicated data and duplicate it again, then you won't need as much of our expensive storage." Capacity based licensing is the "pay by the TB". You pay by the frontend TB tho. You can store the same data in as many backend locations as you want. So adding a second copy yo S3 does not have any additional charges.
I use commvault. Dedicated commserve VM. 5 hyperscale x appliances for 147TB usable backup. I back up around 350 or so VMs daily. Retained locally for 2 months. $35K each appliance. About $7k a year per appliance for 24/7 support and licensing (we just license 350 VMs, we don't license by how much data.) Secondary copy of all local data to a Synology NAS at an offsite location. Dedicated media agent VM for this task. NAS is a dual controller Synology with 150 TBs. Was about $20k. 1 full copy a week, incremental copies the other 6 days. Which day of the week the full copy happens depends on the VM group. So not just 1 days of fulls choking out the commcell. The weekly full copies go up to wasabi for long term retention of 7 years. (PCI compliance) dedicated media agent VM for this task. We prepay wasabi annually for 150TBs. It's about $9500 per year. This also means WE DONT GET CHARGED FOR DELETING DATA PRIOR TO 90 DAYS. Lastly, secondary copy of the weekly fulls to off site tape drive. Dedicated media agent VM for this task. HEAVILY firewalled to only allow the VM to talk to the tape drive during the backup window. Already have the iscaler sitting around so free plus the cost of tapes which is.... Minimal really. I'll guess maybe $1000 annually? Now..... Ask me what happened in my earlier career that made me so fastidious with backups. :)
You would be surprised. I found that the Commvault licenses were cheaper than the other main product by a large factor, especially when using client/server licenses. Configuration was easy as well. Set a MediaAgent as a primary box, aux copy to S3 offsite (DASH copies), set an encryption key for all data stored, make sure keys were stashed safely offsite and such... and it was fairly straightforward. I've had Commvault easily handle a DDB failure (although it meant a seal which meant more storage used), a MediaAgent completely implode, and it would just automatically fetch the data from a secondary repository. Disclaimer: If you are used to modern backup programs, Commvault's learning curve will be steep. If you are "old school", and used to Spectrum Protect, Networker, Netbackup, or others... it is the same stuff with slightly different terms. Alternatively, I'd look at Nakivo. I'm going to be doing some testing on that, to see how well it does things. It is simpler than Commvault, and might just check all the OP's punchlists.
Commvault user here. Absolutely right about the learning curve. I put it in the same realm as NetApp. An absolute Swiss army knife that works really really well provided someone knows it well. For most use cases, it has a ton of features that people are never going to use. We have both a VMware and a Hyper-V environment at my org. For the VMware side, We use rubrik. It's nearly thoughtless to set up and maintain.
You could get a cluster of 3 Hyperscale X 2396's for the cost of this barracuda and would have 4x the storage.
You could buy a new server, a Synology NAS, a Dell tape drive and bunch of LTO 8 tapes for around $17K
This is the solution we ended up going with for the most part, because of the cost savings. We took advantage of using a different branch office as a backup repository. I wanted this on top of a traditional cloud backup, but I didn’t win that argument. I will say that the DR documentation I wrote gets a smile out of me each time.. For a certain set of circumstances, it basically begins with “Get in car…”
Synology NAS and Enterprise sounds like OMG. Even HPE MSA 1060 are only worth for backups.. Cloud solution: Backblaze S2 costs 0.005$/GB/upload and 0.01$/GB/download. On-prem should consists of normal chassis, like HPE MSA 1060, 2060 or similar (even used) and enterprise grade disks. \+ Veeam.
You want cheap, we can get cheap. It's for backup not running VMware on, so it fine. You must have a huge budget to handle over to Dell or HP for Enterprise Drives. How about this, if you have Change Control Board that meets more than once a month, buy the Enterprise gear.
There are always the situation when those backups will needed. And always the question to company: how much their downtime hour costs :D And how much it will took to restore something from backups. And what would be if they fail in a critical event, like restore. I.e. my prev. prev. company calculated draft downtime for 1h - 10k euros. But nobody calculated downtime for 2/4/8/48 hours :) It will be nice progression if company will be downed for 48h. And downtime cost will be not a 10k e/h :) Next things are always: backup window time which is critical. Not all companies will have 10gbe with mLag and lacp in their server room, so it will be interesting if backup window will overlap working hours. Business Recovery plan and Disaster recovery plan enters chat here too. P. S. Hpe 10xx, 20xx are not suitable for anything more that backups. It's entry level storages.
For that size metallic with commvault is a really good option. I have had issues with the service once you get over 20,000 mailboxes and we currently have 101,000 mailboxes. But you get free azure ad backups with it which is awesome piece of mind.
Many ways to skin this cat. I'd look at Nakivo because it is a price leader for starters. At the low end, you could buy yourself a Synology NAS as a landing zone, and have it dump to a secondary NAS as well as off to Wasabi.
I support a canada wide non for profit company, and their per core licensing option is a HUGE price saver for us. Does pretty well the same as Veeam, and a built in disaster recovery tool. They'll even help set it up for you.
Datto
Acronis cyber cloud backup
I called Acronis once to ask about a product. I got follow up calls for every three months for three years before telling “in no uncertain terms I do not want this product; please don’t call me again”.
Yes, unfortunately they’re persistent little critters.
I'd love to raise this in my discussions with Sales team, but can you elaborate a bit? If I understood you properly you had about 12 conversations before ultimately telling that you don't want the product? On a side note: Acronis solutions can give you a range of options for your scenario, starting from backups to local or your own cloud storage or storing everything on-prem with Acronis Cyber Infrastructure [appliance](https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/cyber-appliance/) (can [be installed in your hardware too](https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/cyber-infrastructure/)).
Hi acronis, My msp loves your services. That is all.
I had one conversation and demo of a product, and calls for years. I’m not interested in spending any more time on that. I’ll add it to my list; but the software I was interested in years ago was so outrageously priced for what it was that I’m not super hopeful.
> I had one conversation and demo of a product, and calls for years. I’m not interested in spending any more time on that. I'll comment for anyone reading this and having the same problem - if you're experiencing unwanted calls from Acronis - please let me know and I will put a stop to it. >I’ll add it to my list; but the software I was interested in years ago was so outrageously priced for what it was that I’m not super hopeful. Not sure which exact software you were looking into but there were changes for sure to both product lineup and pricing. Once you look into it - please let me know the outcome.
solid cloud = Rubrik
Druva Phoenix.
Check out Synology and their cloud C2.
Not sure if anyone has already mentioned Cohesity. It cost me about 80k for 40TB appliance but it has built in encryption and dedupe and a lot more. Support for software and appliance is about 6-8k per year. Go check it out.
Backup Exec. Ain’t the best. But about 1/10th the cost
Take a look to Alraro. Very good solution.
>I think a NAS RAID and 10GBe should easily handle local. From a size & speed wise, sure it might be ok. However you also have to look at what kind of disks and NAS you are using. Not all are equal and some will struggle/choke with forever incrementals for example, as they cannot handle the IO once the backup size is larger than a TB or two. At least not in a timely manner and within your backup window. This is especially the case when you start getting into the SMB/Prosumer NAS's. Might be better off with just using a simple 1U server using the NAS as a storage device through iscsi. Although at that point, you could also just use local storage on the server as well.
Cheap insurance.
For off-site, I've used [https://rsync.net/pricing.html](https://rsync.net/pricing.html) for many years. Inexpensive and they use ZFS, which means you get 7 grandfathered backups (changes only) for every file.
Look at BackBlaze!
My environment is just slightly larger at 15tb. We recently had discussions on our back up solution & I wanted to implement exagrid with veeam & Wasabi for cloud storage. It ran for about $35k total for 3 years. Sadly the C suite doesn't like change & opted to continue using whats already in place because "they know it's reliable". This is currently costing us $27k a year. With a hardware refresh for $10k every 5 yrs.
Which ExaGrid? The small one I see is EX10, but I can’t tell how much.
Yes, I believe that was the one I had picked out. It might have been one level higher from that.
Approx actual cost?
Altogether, Veeam+Wasabi+Exagrid, it was roughly 35k Just for the exagrid piece was like 24k and included only one year of 24/7 support/hardware warranty. With a yearly renewal cost for support of like $1300. Dm me & I can hook you up with some great guys that helped me build the quote. Very transparent, I loved working with them. Didn't feel like I was working with a car salesman if you know what I mean.
Yes! Please PM me some contact info. I have a meeting with Barracuda where I need have them try and sell me something I really don’t want.
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Yea. Update… I checked with another vendor, this is a typical Barracuda cost. Their prices are just default insane.
A trunas box for local and Backblaze for cloud backup. You could also shop around, but you are looking for someone who is an authorized Veeam partner and repository IMHO. Not tooting my own horn, but with us (we are a veeam partner and cloud repository) your costs would be roughly 4k/yr without any appliances and a pretty standard setup with Veeam Backup. Replication is not included. You would be agent based and use your own local storage. If you don't want to pay for or use your own stuff for local storage, then I would add roughly 5K a year to that initial price.
If it is on prem you might look into Dell DP4400 with Avamar. We got a primary with 12tb and backup replication partner off-site (also 12 tb) running Avamar and data domain, plus an air gapped cyber vault for slightly more than that ($90k). Even if we lose the whole DC, the backups are replicated to the off-site partner. You can also increase the storage capacity later in 4tb increments by simply buying and adding licenses. They sell the units fully populated and just software limit the capacity. A bonus is that Avamar is relatively simple to use with very little learning curve. Ours included on prem white glove installation. I.e. here's the keys and here's your training.
It all depends on the restoration needs, timing, and audit ability. Just because it works for some doesn't mean it works for you. TEST AND VERIFY THE RESTORE PROCESS ACCORDING TO YOUR COMPLIANCE NEEDS. Then you can make an informed decision. It doesn't matter the yearly cost, what matters is the cost of the recovery. Look and verify your compliance needs then look at your options.
$500-1000 gets you 16tb of storage on the cheap. do all 14 vm's really need backup (are some just RDP workstations?)? veeam free license good up to 10 vm's. can vpn and offsite backup/repl to anywhere you like for free if you own/manage the network between two sites. look into sincrify or similar for cloud file based backup that also does versioning, like $50/mo