Veritas NetBackup has been a best-in-class Enterprise Data Protection Solution for many years. Veritas ranked #1 in Backup and Recovery Software Market Share Revenue, Worldwide for 2017 with 24% (according to Gartner). In fact, Veritas protects more than half of the world’s total data.
Additionally, Veritas continues to be recognized as a ‘Leader’ by Gartner in their popular Magic Quadrant Report. The only vendor to receive this designation every year since the report’s inception in 1999.
While these statistics and accolades from the analysts show Veritas’ strength in data protection, enterprise-class solutions often come with enterprise-class price tags. Did you know that there are four (4) distinct licensing models for Veritas NetBackup? These are important to understand in order to optimize your NetBackup spend.
Traditional License Model
Based on the number of NetBackup clients, agents, servers, and options that NetBackup will be protecting or run on. This is the oldest (original) licensing model
- Pros – Great for environments with mixed physical and virtual workloads, environments with large data volumes to be protected, and environments running minimal NetBackup advanced features
- Cons – Hard to manage proper license inventory and new license acquisition, and could lead to being subject to audit
Capacity Licensing Model
Uses the amount of source data protected per-terabyte as the sole or primary calculation meter. This is a very popular licensing model today
- Pros – Great for deployment for optimal performance, disaster recovery hot sites, unlimited copies, more economical way to obtain advanced features, protection of cloud infrastructure, and easily understood value. Easy to manage license inventory and for new license acquisition (this becomes even easier in NetBackup 8.1.2 with Veritas Smart Meter, a new tool that allows you to track usage and consumption in real-time without scripts). Easy conversion to 360 Data Management Suites economically obtaining other Veritas solutions, in addition to NetBackup
- Cons – Can become expensive as data volumes grow. Historically the nbdeployutil script used to track usage can become difficult to interpret and can lead to unnecessary duplicate spend
NetBackup Enterprise Virtual Client (NEVC)
Aimed at virtual environments, this model uses the count of CPUs, or Occupied Processor Sockets, as the sole or primary calculation meter
- Pros – Great for highly virtualized environments (with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor environments all supported). Costs for data protection do not automatically increase as data volumes do
- Cons – Can only be used with virtualized environments, not physical. Also, not great for compute intensive environments where a large amount of CPUs are required to power workload
360 Data Management Suites
Using NetBackup as the foundation of the bundle, this model allows customers to add the functionality of additional Veritas technologies in a simple and cost-effective manner. These include, but are not limited to Enterprise Vault, Data Insight, Velocity, Access, Resiliency Platform (VRP)
- Pros – Great way to economically obtain other Veritas solutions, in addition to NetBackup
- Cons – Capacity based metering can become expense as data volumes grow. Not a good fit for organizations only looking to utilize NetBackup, and not other Veritas solutions
Many IT Professional do not realize that Veritas offers the most complete set of licensing options in the Data Protection Market. Make sure that your organization is using the model best suited for your unique data protection needs.
Before you renew your support/maintenance contract, please contact a dcVAST NetBackup licensing expert for a free Licensing Right-Size Review.
