We've been running Veritas NetBackup on-premises for several years, but the combined licensing and infrastructure costs are becoming difficult to justify. We're evaluating alternatives focused mainly on VMware workloads and want to understand both the short-term economics and the long-term scalability.
For a simplified model, we have 10 VMs at roughly 200 GB each. Five require one year of retention, while the other five need 30 days. That gives us about 2 TB of initial backup data with an estimated daily change rate of 0.1%.
We're comparing an AWS-native design using AWS Backup, EBS snapshots, and S3 lifecycle tiers against Veeam or similar third-party tools, as well as continuing with an enterprise platform such as NetBackup. We want to account for retention growth, snapshot and object-storage costs, data transfer or egress, licensing, infrastructure, restore performance, disaster recovery testing, and day-to-day administration.
AWS appears simpler on paper, but we're unsure how well it works once long-term retention, large restores, and regular recovery testing are included. Veeam offers more flexibility, but it may simply move costs into software, repositories, and operational management. I'd appreciate real-world experience with migrations or cost comparisons, especially which expenses tend to matter most at scale and whether third-party tools justify their added complexity.
5 Answers
The technical features can matter more than the raw storage price. Veeam provides options such as booting workloads from backups, application-aware processing, WAN optimization, replication, and automated backup verification. Those features can significantly reduce recovery time and make disaster-recovery testing more realistic. AWS services may still be the better fit if your workloads already run there, but for an on-premises VMware estate you should model the network path and full restore workflow carefully.
I wouldn’t compare these solutions purely by monthly storage cost. The bigger differences are usually licensing, restore speed, recovery capabilities, and the amount of engineering time required to operate and test the system. AWS-native backup can be straightforward, but make sure the estimate includes lifecycle behavior, restore charges, data transfer, and the cost of regularly testing recovery.
Don’t overlook egress and disaster-recovery scenarios. Restoring a large environment across regions or over a WAN can be expensive, especially if traffic passes through services such as a managed NAT gateway. Also, if the primary data center is unavailable for weeks, simply having backups is not enough—you need somewhere to run the workloads. A DR provider or secondary site may add cost, but it can be far more valuable than choosing the cheapest storage tier.
The difficult costs to quantify are often operational: monitoring jobs, fixing failed backups, maintaining retention policies, handling upgrades, and having an engineer available during a major incident. A managed provider can sometimes be competitive even with a higher per-gigabyte price because it includes recovery verification, support, and possibly the ability to run backed-up VMs during an outage. I’d compare each option using total cost of ownership and recovery objectives rather than storage price alone.
For an on-premises VMware environment, a common practical design is Veeam with a local repository for fast restores, plus immutable copies in object storage such as Wasabi or Backblaze B2. That gives you quick operational recovery while keeping an off-site, ransomware-resistant copy. It can be cheaper than putting everything into AWS, but the comparison should include the repository hardware, support, object-storage fees, and Veeam licensing.
That makes sense. We were initially focused on licensing and storage, but the cost of recovery testing and the operational effort may be just as important. Is the licensing difference usually the biggest gap between Veeam and a legacy platform, or do infrastructure and support costs tend to dominate?