Alternatives to Veeam

[garethEds]

Morning All,

 

Due to rising costs and a reduced budget I'm having to look at all our software purchases. Veeam is my current focus. We backup 3 physical servers (HyperV nodes) and 10-15 virtual servers. Veeam does what we want and works, but what else is out there being used by you all?

 

Let me know,

 

Cheers

 

Gareth

[synaesthesia]

To be completely frank, Veeam is worth it's weight in gold. You could easily replace it with just about anything else but it'll never be as easy. And backups in an IT infrastructure are like a power supply in a decent computer - the one item you must never skimp on. Keep it!

[garethEds]

To be completely frank, Veeam is worth it's weight in gold. You could easily replace it with just about anything else but it'll never be as easy. And backups in an IT infrastructure are like a power supply in a decent computer - the one item you must never skimp on. Keep it!

 

HI there - that's probably the way forward but I have to show that I've looked at things ;-)

 

Gareth

[Norphy]

I don't know how it compares in price, but the last time I evaluated backup software I liked Arcserve UDP. I liked it better than Veeam, tbh.

 

If you have a System Center license, there's always DPM I suppose, but I hated that the last time I used it.

 

Other backup products aside from Veeam, Arcserve and DPM that I've used:

 

Backup Exec. Do not touch with a bargepole. Just don't.

Commvault: It works but it's über expensive and overly complex. I spent a lot of time on the phone with their support the last time I used it. I got onto first name basis with one of the Dell engineers that supported it, that tells you a lot.

Edited June 20, 2024 by Norphy

[MCPearson]

I also massively back VEEAM, it's really easy to use and it costs me very little each month. It supporting immutable cloud storage is a big plus from a security standpoint, as well as 2FA, its ability to spin up on just about anything, and the monitoring features from VEEAM One keeping an eye on my cluster.

 

I've used BackupAssist in the past for a primary I looked after. It was very basic but was a one-time purchase license, which you could upgrade further if you wanted guest file level restore, etc. Not sure how they do pricing now.

[TwistedHelixis]

I use this at a couple of schools - https://www.altaro.com/vm-backup/

[ITGuyNW]

Backups is one of those where you get what you pay for.

 

I've moved from DPM to Veeam in the last year and its been brilliant.

[dhicks]

We backup 3 physical servers (HyperV nodes) and 10-15 virtual servers.

 

If you can squeeze that down to 10 VMs, Veeam Community Edition would handle that. I use that on my own personal / test server setup. It doesn't have things like the snazzy scale-out backup features to cloud storage, but you can sync local backups with cloud storage separatly easily enough with something like rclone.

[jthompson]

When we were originally purchasing Veeam ( few years ago now), our supplier suggested Nakivo. They reckoned it basically did the same thing as Veeam under the hood, but at a lower cost.

[msi_school]

If you can squeeze that down to 10 VMs, Veeam Community Edition would handle that. I use that on my own personal / test server setup. It doesn't have things like the snazzy scale-out backup features to cloud storage, but you can sync local backups with cloud storage separatly easily enough with something like rclone.

 

I have used the Community version with a number of different organisations and I cant see any down side for a school, the only thing I can see missing is the cloud storage but as @dhicks says there are ways round this.

[Aprice]

Veeam here, we resell PeaSoup. We effectively pay per TB and then get the licensing bundled with it.

 

Pretty sure the last time we looked at it was basically cheaper buying it from them with cloud storage than just buying the licensing. Also helps that the support is from Peasoup, and they're really good.

 

 

 

I've used Altaro a few times but was unimpressed, lots of support tickets and problems. Didn't seem to be great for Hyper-V.

Edited June 20, 2024 by Aprice

[dmj]

HI there - that's probably the way forward but I have to show that I've looked at things ;-)

 

Gareth

 

Retraining budget vs pay the fee

[pablo007]

we have used quest vranger its really good as well, we hit the the 5tb size limit for VEEAM community but i agree with what others have said VEEAM is brilliant too.

[PotNoodleTech]

Veeam is the absolute last thing I would try and cost save on.

 

Theres plenty of other meat on the bone first. Get rid of the £3k a year garbage curriculum software programmed by a guy in a shed and hardly ever used by teachers before looking at mission critical stuff IMO.

[DrCheese]

Barracuda do an on site appliance that sync's up to the cloud - That's an option.

 

But yea, I would cut pretty much everything else to the bone before I got rid of Veeam. Having dealt with other backup software in my time (ugh backup exec..) I would not want to lose it.

[Jonah]

We’ve recently moved to Synology, backing up both on-prem VMs and 365 data.

 

It’s been flawless so far🤞

[dhicks]

We’ve recently moved to Synology, backing up both on-prem VMs and 365 data.

 

We also use an on-site Synnology appliance, in our case for backing up Google Workspace (which we then also mirror to cloud backup). Simple to set up, seems to just sit and work. I haven't tried it backing up Windows servers, but am impressed with its performance / ease of use on Google Workspace. Maybe more of a one-time capital investement, which might/might not be easier to convince people about, depending on how you tend to be funded.

Edited June 20, 2024 by dhicks

[Olliedawg]

Veeam here, we resell PeaSoup. We effectively pay per TB and then get the licensing bundled with it.

 

Pretty sure the last time we looked at it was basically cheaper buying it from them with cloud storage than just buying the licensing. Also helps that the support is from Peasoup, and they're really good.

 

 

 

I've used Altaro a few times but was unimpressed, lots of support tickets and problems. Didn't seem to be great for Hyper-V.

 

+1 for Peasoup!

[PotNoodleTech]

Actually yeh now that it's ben mentioned above if you held me by gunpoint and told me to cancel veeam - synology would be the next one. I went to see a school in the next county that was using synology alot and was very impressed.

[Jonah]

We also use an on-site Synnology appliance, in our case for backing up Google Workspace (which we then also mirror to cloud backup). Simple to set up, seems to just sit and work. I haven't tried it backing up Windows servers, but am impressed with its performance / ease of use on Google Workspace. Maybe more of a one-time capital investement, which might/might not be easier to convince people about, depending on how you tend to be funded.

 

Yea, it’s a larger initial investment than most other options, balanced against the fact there’s no annual subscription, etc. and no limits on the amount you can backup other than physical space.

 

I think it cost us around £20k for two RS appliances, a “primary” NAS with about 208TB, and then an offsite “backup” NAS at another school that pulls immutable snapshots with about 110TB.