How much per Gb is an attractive price for backup products for MSPs?

General Discussions
1

Hi Guys
What will be an interesting price point per GB for backup?
thanks

2

Melih-
I’ve been looking into a solution for this as well. Incidentally since you mentioned Acronis to me I’ve tried to reach out to their partner line multiple times and haven’t gotten any response. In any case I’m more interested in functionality than per GB price. On a small scale I’ve tried to do a break-even analysis on when it makes sense to buy infrastructure to support backup vs. paying for the per GB pricing. To make a long story short for us it just doesn’t make sense to build out infrastructure which only leaves us choosing vendors. We offer DR at different price points based on what the customer wants. We’ve broken it down a few different tiers:

  1. File Only Backup: cheap backup for very small clients. We only deal with vendors that use a per GB pricing model. For this type of client a fee per machine is cost prohibitive.
  2. Hybrid Backup: This is the StorageCraft model. Local images are created and “important” data is in the cloud
  3. Complete DR : This is where I could really use a good solution. I need a solution that will create Virtual images locally, upload backup and images to the cloud and the ability to bring up a virtual server or set of servers in the cloud. I do have a provider for this but I’m not entirely happy. If you are interested in the details of my current solution and what could be done to improve it send me an email and I’ll go into more detail.

So the problem I face as an MSP is that I need different types of backup for different types of clients. The real answer to your question is that I don’t there is a single per GB offering is going to be attractive to all clients. Some customers are willing to pay a premium for a fuller feature set and some say “why would pay more than what Mozy charges”. What market are you trying to serve and what features can you currently offer? Are you going after the high-end StorageCraftand DR type customers or are you trying to hit the low-end Mozy type customers?

Josh

3

hi Josh,

We are trying to come up with the best solution for our MSP partners.
Would love to hear more about it from you. Also we can take this discussion to the technical committe part of the forum so that dev team can act on it if you like.

4

Josh
I posed your questions to people I know at Acronis and this was their reply:

**
Our offering has ALL of the backup in ONE platform and more – also complete Disaster Recovery, Archiving, Files sharing. and asked me to send this video to you– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ptJrns3xfY

Your feedback is greatly appreciated. We only want what is best for our MSP partners.

5

I almost always shy away from 100% “Per Gigabyte” backup providers. Like Josh said, functionality is the big thing. Acronis and Storagecraft offer the functionality I need. Then you have Vendors like Datto that take the functionality and shape it into a sell-able appliance offering both onsite and hosted. Unfortunatly for me. Datto is FAR to expensive for what I can offer to my clients. I usually end up with a NAS or External HDD and a copy of Acronis due to how small my clients currently are.

6

We are testing Arcserve UDP to a NAS storage (or file server) especially because they offer a full workstation edition for free. You can upgrade it to the paid one to benefit from deduplication. Even in the free edition, you have a full centralized management console which allows you to create jobs & monitor their status.

7

We currently use iDrive for backup and while it is cheap per GB, it has its downsides and its upsides.

We considered Acronis that is integrated with C1, but it is more expensive than the backup manager we were using before iDrive.

I think you should look into integrating idrive or at least partnering with them. It does everything we need and it gives us unlimited licenses plus sub-accounts so we can manage each clients data easily. We just pay for the data.

2.5TB is $799 a year ($0.32 per GB). We can get 5TB for $1499 a year ($0.30 per GB).

8

Hello @Larry_Core ,

Thank you for the feedback. We have integrated Acronis into Comodo One as you mentioned but I will forward the request to possibly integrate (or partner with) idrive also.