By Brad Vincent

As we all know, the pricing of data protection solutions varies widely from one vendor to another.  And with so many different licensing schemes and policies, it can be difficult for customers to determine what a solution will cost in the end.  Initial quotes are easy to obtain, but what about additional licensing down the road?  New tape libraries?  Additional disk capacity?  Not to mention support contract renewals!

In the Data Protector business team, we’ve always taken pride in having a product with simple, straightforward licensing, and aggressive pricing both on licensing and support.  But the world of data protection has become more complex lately, as environments become more virtualized, new methods of data reduction and deduplication are offered, and storage capacity requirements increase faster than ever.  So, we recently went through an exercise to reaffirm that we still offer the lowest cost of ownership in these new data protection environments… and, yes, we’ve even had to make an adjustment or two in the process, just as our competitors have.

We recently put together a set of three “real-world” configuration scenarios that best represented data protection environments today – a small, medium and large one.  Each of these configurations was created after a thorough amount of research – including discussions with analysts, and a detailed sizing analysis to make sure that these scenarios are as realistic and representative as possible of the majority of our customer’s environments.  Each scenario included a great deal of virtualization (with several thousand VMs in the large scenario), as well as VTL-based deduplication (the most common form being used today).  All of the necessary backup servers, media servers, and destination backup devices such as tape libraries were also factored into this cost analysis activity. 

Once these scenarios were created, the licensing and support costs were priced out for each of the major vendors in the data protection software market.  And this was no easy task, given the complexity of some of these vendors’ licensing policies.  In the end, what we found was no surprise:  Data Protector continues to offer the lowest cost of any major backup & recovery software product on the market today.  But what did surprise us was the following:

·         The total cost savings Data Protector provided vs. all of these vendors ranged from 40 to 60%, and in some cases was 70% or more.

·         Data Protector required the fewest number of licenses for the same configurations… in some cases less than 10% of the number required by other vendors.

·         Data Protector remains the easiest product to quote, with no client licensing, no “processor tiering”, and no extra “options” for basic functionality such as reporting or drive sharing.

These results confirmed that Data Protector not only offers excellent Total Cost of Ownership through its functionality, but also continues to do so through its pricing model.  Nonetheless, we’ve made recent adjustments to our licensing policies to further simplify the ownership of the product – one example is the recent change to Data Protector’s Advanced Backup to Disk licensing, which allows users to purchase based on the physical, native capacity of a VTL device… essentially making the cost of deduplicated data free.  Another way Data Protector keeps things simple is by maintaining the same licensing in virtual and non-virtual environments.  No special licensing to worry about, no special rules – for online backup, the same inexpensive license is required regardless of where it’s used.  And best of all, no charge for VM clients.

There’s no doubt that this pricing and licensing world will continue to evolve, as vendors struggle to keep up with new technologies and ever-changing customer requirements.  But rest assured, Data Protector will continue to evolve right along with it.