Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Arcserve UDP

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

Incentivized

If I were speaking to a fellow Managed Service Provider, I would likely NOT recommend this product. There are simply too many other tools out there that are better hitting this particular market. And the pain points that we do have with them are especially difficult because of our business model. However in speaking to pretty much anyone else in IT/Disaster Recovery this is an enterprise tool built to handle anything you throw at it. UNC paths and linking backup servers to one another, the flexibility of the tool allows for maximum cost savings if you build it right.

Incentivized

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

Incentivized

• It is reliable and once it is up and running you do not need to worry about it.
• It is flexible; you can use it to backup on-prem or in the cloud.
• Backup and DR

Incentivized

• Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing
• Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well.
• While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark.

Incentivized

• Notifications - on the odd occasion something doesn't work, I get way too many email notifications!
• Explanation of issues - sometimes when there is a problem, the explanation is a bit lacking in the logs as to why
• Flagging of errors - sometimes minor errors just get a warning flag, and it doesn't really notify you that they are there.

Incentivized

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

Incentivized

It works great in our infrastructure, we have reduced the risk of losing information at a lower TCO compared to other solutions. The implementation process was precise and fast and upgrades have always been smooth. It delivers what it promises.

Incentivized

Pretty good--I haven't actually had to call them much so it's hard to say. The box works well enough and most of my issues have been related to the rest of my network, rather than the appliance itself.

Incentivized

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

Incentivized

Arcserve [UDP] has stood the test of time due to its low cost-to-feature value proposition for our company. We have ultimately decided to move to a more MSP-friendly product in N-Able Backup, but Arcserve [UDP] kept us around for years with their reliable and inexpensive product that delivered above and beyond technologically of their competitors throughout all that time.

Incentivized

• We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
• Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
• Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.

Incentivized

• We have been able to keep our clients' costs low and add advanced features with no additional overhead for us in licensing.
• It does however cost us a significant amount of additional technician time to review backups each day compared to other products aimed in our vertical.

Incentivized