Additional Information on Cost Estimation in Veeam Plug-In for Google Cloud

The cost estimation feature allows you to approximately estimate the costs of Google Cloud resources required to run data protection operations for a backup policy. You can obtain granular information on how much costs running the policy will incur, with an option to export the estimation to CSV or XML. You will get the following information:

• Snapshot Costs – the costs of creating and maintaining cloud-native snapshots.
• Backup Costs – the costs of storing backup data in backup repositories and the costs of performing worker-related operations.
• Traffic Costs – the network usage charges for transferring VM instance data between different regions. For more information, see Google Cloud documentation.
• Transaction Costs – the operation charges for requesting and retrieving data within Cloud Storage. For more information, see Google Cloud documentation.
• Total Costs

Note: The cost estimation does not cover the costs of performing restore operations.

The cost estimation is based on the following settings specified for a backup policy:

• Sizes of VM instances included in the policy
• Regions where the VM instances reside
• The region where the backup repository storing the backed-up data belongs
• The amount of traffic sent and received between the regions
• Scheduling options configured for the policy

The cost estimation also includes the following built-in constant charges:

• Data change rates (3% daily)
• % of the total VM instance capacity in use (70% of the provisioned size)
• Backup compression ratio 2:1, that is, the ratio between the uncompressed and compressed data size (for example, if a file is compressed from 10 MB to 2 MB in size, this means that the compression ratio is 5:1).

When optimizing the costs, you must understand the following:

• Are you facing unexpected network traffic charges that occur due to out-of-region data transfers?
  In this case, you can try modifying the policy setting to choose another repository. This may help you reduce the costs. For example, you can select a repository that is located in the same region where the source VM instances belong.
• Are you facing high Snapshot Costs?
  In this case, you can try adjusting the snapshot retention settings. This may help you reduce the costs.
• Are you facing high Backup Costs?
  In this case, you can try configuring the scheduling options to run the policy less frequently. This may help you reduce infrastructure costs for the policy.