Veeam Maintenance Agreement - Stay or Go?

[DavR]

To give you an idea also, i'm running Veeam Backup Essentials Enterprise (yes you read that right, Enterprise!) at non educational pricing (don't believe you can on the essentials bundle) which is 3x 2 socket bundles at 1 year + 3x 4 year maintenance and it came in at £734 per year to cover 3x dual socket servers in a cluster.

If you break that down that's £245 per year per server or £122.50 if you want to be a socket count person.

 

Some things to note here:

 

- I licensed before the end of June as Veeam and their resellers clearly advertised a price increase from July.

- I licensed for 5 years total (Socket bundle with included 1 year + 4 year maintenance) to lock in price and anyone who uses Veeam properly will tell you its a product you are not going to look at moving away from on a technical/ease of use/performance level anytime soon!

- Use a decent reseller, i'm not getting anything out of this but to drop some names: Misco and Insight are two that I use from a pool of around 10 (yes i'm nice and let others quote from blanket emails I send out) and between them they win 100% of the time by at least 2% margin if not more and I go with the rule of first time quote! None of this "OK sorry to hear someone gave you a better quote let me try and adjust our pricing and come back to you" bullsh*t, get it right first time or don't bother (IT sales people need to learn to not be greedy on their margins).

I can even give you contact names and you can tell them I sent you if your curious but you will have to PM me.

 

Even after the price increase I would of expected my per server per year cost to increase to around £300 (rough) and still be acceptable in my eyes.

 

Locking in and planning licensing on a 3 to 5 year term saves you so much money and should not be looked at as a yearly costing.

 

It's something to think about, long term licensing deals are better value, especially in the current climate of massive hikes because "something something exchange rate something something brexit".

 

Are you paying Veeam up front or entering into five year contracts with annual payments? The latter is a no-brainer, but the former is always a bit trickier when the budget runs in single years.

[Tefters]

Pay up front otherwise you are looking at financing options which makes the saving worthless.

 

I know budgets are done yearly however this involves a sit down discussion with your business manager and finance department to say "Hey, I can save you a truck load of money and also get the ultimate software licensing if we look at carving out portions of money yearly to cover 3 to 5 year licensing options", its a little tricky at first but works a treat.

 

Even with price hikes over the last 3 years i've saved costs everywhere.

 

My Microsoft licensing is so streamline its untrue, I've fully utilized Office 365 to get rid of on-site maintenance costs as well as server licensing and cal's. Don't know if you are aware but you can trim the OVS student and staff licensing and remove portions you don't use to drop the cost such as Sharepoint and Exchange as the OVS student and teacher offering includes licensing for multiple CAL's on multiple products and those individual CAL's can be removed to trim costs.

I have VMware on a 6 socket bundle at £300 per year on a 3 year.

Veeam as mentioned above.

I have my ISP at present on £8k per year on a yearly renewal for 100/100 with 8 SIP channels and 16 IP's and as of next year will be 300/1000 with the same IP and SIP count for £4300 per year

 

Also you need to be aware that Microsoft pricing is still increasing yearly at the moment and OVS is going bye bye in the coming years leaving us with business pricing so you need to be sitting down with suppliers and business manager/finance manager, auditing your environment and planning cost reductions now more than ever otherwise in 2 to 3 years time you will really be struggling with licensing costings not to mention Brexit and conversion rates on top of that.

 

Licensing is one of those things you need to stay on top of understanding nowadays just as much as the technical side as its going through big changes, take Microsoft's new core licensing on Windows Server compared to its socket licensing for example. A lot of people moaning that its a lot more money to license nowadays which is strictly only true if you had new servers with ridiculous amounts of cores however if you have servers with that many cores than you should ideally have less physical server overall as the extra cores compensate for the need of physical.

Edited July 28, 2017 by Tefters

[DavR]

I must admit I haven't really considered long term options for Veeam / WMware as the annual licensing has been fairly small, but definitely something to consider when planning next year's budgets.

 

Microsoft Licensing I already have on a three year deal, but invoiced annually, it's the way to go to avoid the constant hikes. Although whether that will fall off a cliff at the end of three years I don't know!

[DavR]

Just an update on this for anyone who's following.... I have now completed my downgrade, it took a while but I've massively reduced this year's Veeam renewal

 

We were running Veeam Enterprise, and took a two step downgrade process to go from Enterprise to Standard, then Standard to Standard Essentials. Enterprise to Standard was free, but switching Standard to Standard Essentials cost £79 per 2 socket bundle for a one off conversion fee.

 

We were quoted £1020 for this years maintenance agreement, but even with the conversion fee, this year's bill is now down to £474! Definitely worth pursuing.

[flyinghaggis]

 

Also look at Altaro as an alternative.

 

We've also been looking at Altaro just so we have something to compare against Veeam which is looking very expensive and like it might be overkill for our backup needs. Altaro mentions Azure cloud backup if you get the unlimited plus edition but if you don't have that can you backup to other cloud/offsite storage just as easily with the standard/unlimited version or is it just Azure? I haven't checked on pricing, and I'm not at all familiar with Azure, but I'm guessing other cloud storage providers will be cheaper than Microsoft Azure?

 

In terms of on-site, off-site, cloud backups what's everyone doing these days? I guess we'll initially backup-to-disk on an on-site server but we'll also need cloud/offline backups of some variety in addition to this to protect against hardware failure/ransomware attacks/etc.

 

Not quite sure what the most resilient and cost effective setup would be at the moment

Edited September 27, 2017 by flyinghaggis

[Tefters]

Your backup/DR setup will depend on your schools needs.

Our school building is an old legacy build made of brick everywhere and pretty much built as a big square/rectangle with a huge playground/open space in the middle.

Due to this I have the server room in 1 corner, 1st Backup in another corner and 2nd Backup in another corner. It would take a large tornado to wipe out all 3 areas, no way a fire, flood or explosion could hit all 3 areas therefore I save on not needing offsite backup.

 

As for ransomware, if your backup devices are properly secured I can’t see how ransomware would be able to hit all 3. Ransomware is typically targeted at end user machines which then spread to open file shares such as file servers, sims etc...

[flyinghaggis]

As for ransomware, if your backup devices are properly secured I can’t see how ransomware would be able to hit all 3. Ransomware is typically targeted at end user machines which then spread to open file shares such as file servers, sims etc...

 

The fear I had is that increasingly we're seeing ransomware attacks which are also network worms. So in addition to running on a client computer they also actively look for exploits which can allow them to infect other computers on the network which could potentially also include the backup server depending on it's connectivity. Likewise if the backup server can be compromised how long before ransomware attacks become 'cloud-aware' and actively look for connections/logins to things like Azure/AWS/etc in order to target them as well?

 

I realise that's a bit of a doomsday scenario but it's certainly possible to the point where I don't feel confident having disk-only backups that are running live on networked servers. I think there's still a need for some-kind of offline backup as part of a disaster recovery scenario. I'd wondered if a cloud based backup might be an alternative to offline but I do worry about it being accessible in the event a backup server with access to it is compromised by a trojan/ransomware/etc.

 

Do you guys think a backup to disk then cloud solution is suitably secure or should there also be some kind of offline disk/tape factored in as part of the strategy?

Edited September 27, 2017 by flyinghaggis

[DavR]

Depends how much you're willing to spend really doesn't it.

 

For our needs (large primary, MIS and email hosted externally), we have a full onsite backup and then key data into an offsite backup using separate software. We don't have offline backups yet because of the management overhead.

 

We do have two well separated buildings, with production and backup servers in different areas, so you could argue that offsite backup is redundant. But, with the way things are going, like @flyinghaggis, I am a little wary of ransomware encrypting my local onsite backup (I did tighten up the security access on the backup server after the NHS debacle). I'm relatively confident that my offsite is safe from ransomware... for now.

[mavhc]

Depends how the offsite backup is linked.

 

Just make sure network access is write only, copy on write, so it's impossible for any data to be overwritten (eg with snapshots). Only allow access to read/delete from a specific ip/vlan/2fa/etc.

 

Don't run Windows as your backup OS.

 

There's a billion other computers ransomware authors will be after before that one.

[flyinghaggis]

We've just heard back with pricing for Altaro but it's looking considerably more expensive (as in nearly double the price) than Veeam?

 

How did others find the Altaro pricing compared with Veeam?