Veeam Data Platform v13.1 Archive Pricing 2026

What actually shipped

Veeam Data Platform v13.1 is generally available now, with the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization plug-in following later in Q3, according to StorageReview. Alongside it, Veeam Data Cloud Vault Archive launched as a new managed storage tier built specifically for long-term retention of ageing backups, compliance copies and redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data.

The two releases are designed to work together. Policy-based tiering can move older backups automatically from the standard Veeam Data Cloud Vault into Archive, while a new NAS Direct to Archive capability lets administrators send large unstructured NAS datasets straight to long-term storage rather than parking them on premium, fast-recovery repositories. Anyone currently mapping out platform coverage should check the Veeam products line-up against v13.1's expanded 14-platform hypervisor list before assuming existing licensing still fits.

Archive tier pricing, tier by tier

The headline number is $4.50 per TB per month for Vault Archive, billed annually upfront. StorageReview frames this as roughly a third of the $14/TB Foundation tier and less than a fifth of the $24/TB Advanced tier. Storage and write activity are included in that price; reads and restores are billed in arrears on top.

The trade-offs scale with the discount. Archive carries a 180-day minimum retention period against 30 days for Foundation and Advanced, and typical retrieval takes more than 15 hours compared with minutes for the other two tiers. Read allowance drops from unlimited (Advanced) and fair use (Foundation) to none included at all on Archive. Durability also steps down slightly, at 11 nines versus Advanced's 12 nines with synchronous geo-copies, and data locality is selectable at region level rather than the country-level granularity Foundation offers.

Why this reshapes the TCO conversation

For UK buyers, the comparison isn't just Veeam-versus-Veeam. Wider market benchmarking shows how aggressive this pricing is: IBM's UK/EU Cloud Object Storage Flex tier lists storage capacity at roughly £7.30/TB-month (its full flex pricing model can add further operation and retrieval charges, so like-for-like TCO comparisons need care), still above the archive rate here, while hyperscale cold-storage benchmarks from AWS Glacier Deep Archive and OVHcloud's Cold Archive have historically sat at sub-cent-per-GB storage prices paired with separate retrieval and operation fees — the same pattern Vault Archive follows with its arrears-billed reads.

A Veeam community cost analysis for Azure Blob cold-tier backup found totals ranging from roughly £3.65/TB-month to £8.52/TB-month depending on object size and access pattern, a reminder that headline storage rates rarely tell the whole story. Buyers replacing on-prem HDD sprawl — with its drive refresh cycles, rack space, power and cooling — should run the full comparison through a backup and DR sizing calculator before assuming Archive is automatically cheaper at scale.

The security case for paying for immutability

Veeam's own justification leans on two figures cited in the release: backup repositories are targeted in 96% of ransomware attacks, and 58% of organisations rank data residency and sovereignty as the most important factor in choosing where to store data. Vault Archive answers both with WORM immutability, logical air-gapping, AES-256 encryption using customer-controlled keys, and region-level residency selection.

This positions Archive as the immutable or air-gapped copy in Veeam's 3-2-1-1-0 model, replacing the physical handling, transport and off-site logistics that tape has traditionally required. UK teams building or auditing their approach should compare this against the wider immutable backup architectures landscape, and weigh it alongside the broader backup and cyber resilience solutions available in-market, particularly given Veeam's own data that fewer than one in three ransomware victims recover all their data even when 90% of organisations believe they can.

What UK buyers need to check before committing

Availability is not uniform. StorageReview notes that Archive is not offered in every region where Veeam Vault exists — Brazil South, for example, currently lists Foundation and Advanced only, with a per-region tier map published on Veeam's Vault page. UK and EU buyers should confirm regional availability and residency options for their specific compliance requirements before designing a retention policy around Archive.

The 180-day minimum retention and 15-hour-plus retrieval window mean Archive is unsuitable for anything approaching active recovery — it's built for compliance copies, aged backup chains, and cold NAS data, not the tier you restore from during an incident. Buyers evaluating platforms head-to-head can use the compare Veeam Data Platform breakdown to see how these retention and recovery trade-offs sit against rival platforms, and should model the wider archive category against the cold archive storage server options still viable for UK data centres.

The bottom line for backup budgets

At $4.50/TB/month, Vault Archive gives UK buyers a managed, immutable alternative to buying more spinning disk purely to satisfy retention policy — provided the data genuinely is cold. The read-in-arrears billing and 180-day floor mean it rewards disciplined data classification rather than blanket migration, so the sizing exercise matters as much as the sticker price.