Amazon S3 Glacier vs. AWS Storage Gateway

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

The AWS Storage Gateway is well suited if you want a quick way to off load your backups to the cloud to eliminate the need of a offsite storage location for physical tapes. The ROI is quite good from that perspective since you can utilize Glacier storage for the virtual tapes. The AWS Storage Gateway is not well suited if data sets being backed up is very large. The lack of de-duplication will add time to your backup. It will also increase the egress charges

• 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

• Easy to deploy: Setting the solution up took much less time than anticipated.
• AWS management Console facilitates monitoring: This allowed us to ditch a home baked solution in lieu this great tool!
• Secure data transfer: Easily passing our company audits and standards for security.
• VM integration

• 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

• Ease of finding useful helpful tips on using AWS
• Dumbing down of the technical jargon on the site
• Short sharp to the point step videos - answering some common questions
• Remembering not everyone is an IT person - could be more user friendly

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

AWS Storage Gateway is a good product and for certain use cases works really well, however i would like to see it support additional protocols in the future.

Incentivized

AWS Storage Gateway is supported by the AWS Support team, they provide excellent support and great SLAs for our needs.

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

AWS Storage Gateway performance is ever excellent since we deployed it in our company. Downloading this platform and installing the setup is easy as compared to other similar products. Virtual data that we get from our cloud servers [are] good in the enhancement of better planning and safety [compliance]. I have been able to integrate the data from our server to our systems to streamline workflow and boost performance.

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

• It has positively affected us for ETL on reports to customers that neither party wants to pay too much for.
• It has also positively affected us where our backup systems where old and had large maintenance costs.
• It has some new, net negative impact with slowed down delivery or random slowing incidents.

Incentivized