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Have you been tasked with finding a new backup solution, only to become overwhelmed with various options, features and licensing models? If you’re looking for a backup solution, Synology can provide the insight to help steer clear of pricing pitfalls.
There are two types of business models in the backup market: backup hardware and software sold separately, and an all-in-one integrated backup appliance. For most companies, the reason they purchase backup software is to leverage existing hardware. However, software license fees associated with the total cost of ownership are often overlooked – take VMware backup for example. Below are three common hidden costs:
1. Licensing and maintenance cost
In VM backup cases, vendors typically take different approaches to how they charge you; either per CPU socket or per VM host (system). Depending on setup, a per host charge may not always be more expensive than per socket. E.g. if running services on a 2-socket VMware server at $500 per socket, that’s going to cost more than a charge of $800 for just the host itself. Aside from licensing fees, don’t forget maintenance renewal costs for software updates, patches, and technical support. Did you know the cost of annual support renewals can account for 22% – 27% of the perpetual license cost? Table 1 shows that if we compare 3-year total cost on backup software, there’s almost no cost difference between perpetual and subscription licenses after counting in support renewal costs.
2. Management cost
The integration of software and hardware involves two different companies with different support systems. Businesses need to look at the software and hardware separately to determine the root cause when a problem arises. If you don’t have an in-house IT team, you’ll probably have to contact different vendors, going back and forth, leading to reduced productivity.
3. Storage cost
The last thing to keep in mind is the cost of hardware. Many businesses are limited by budget and usually opt for freemium software. However, freemiums can come with feature limitations, the major drawback of which would be to perform a full backup every time. For example, if you want to keep daily backups for seven days and the data size is 1TB with the average daily change rate at 5%, you’ll find incremental backups will save 80% on storage. By contrast, it’s very likely you’d waste over 6x more space at the destination server compared with freemium software. Make sure to include the cost of hard drives and server hardware when you want to back up complex business workloads.
It all adds up in the end
We compared the license fees from other backup vendors with similar feature sets (see Table 2). In just the first year alone, Synology Active Backup saves you more than 50%. The cost savings can be even more significant when compared to Dell EMC or HPE as backup storage servers, or when you need to back up larger business workloads. With licence fee savings, you can get a Synology NAS while protecting business workloads on virtual machines, physical servers, Office 365, and G Suite – both accessible with a price approximately the same or less than the first-year license fee.
You can further improve storage efficiency with global deduplication, which prevents redundant data when backing up from multiple devices. For example, global cosmetics brand Shiseido saved 54% (28TB out of the total 58TB) storage usage with global deduplication in its business environment. Without this technology, it could have cost approximately $1,500 to store the extra 30TB of data on hard drives and expansion units. Table 3 shows how Synology Active Backup for Business compares with other backup solutions. Besides cost advantages, Active Backup integrates features you can find in modern backup software, allowing you to manage backup tasks from one console, ensuring fast and reliable recovery.
This article is part of PCR’s Security Sector Spotlight – in association with 
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