Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Axcient x360Recover vs. Smarsh

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

I feel that Axcient x360Recover is well suited for any environment, both large and small. Weather you build your own device, BYOD or purchase one of theirs, it all works great. I even use it at home via the direct to cloud option. Well work the investment. I am unable to find a downside at this time.

This appliance is well suited for organizations that have a need to monitor, moderate, or log social networking site use or the use of any website. It is a very solid tool for any information security department to have at their disposal.

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

• Setup and configuration is extremely easy.
• The business continuity component for spinning up the desired recovery point as a virtual machine on the appliance in order to keep the business operational is rock solid.
• Recovering the desired backup point back to the physical hardware or virtual environment and syncing the most recent changes to finalize the recovery is awesome.
• The system documentation is concise and easy to use.
• The support team is absolutely fantastic.

• Discovery: It allows for easy discoveries by the compliance and cyber security departments.
• Ethical walls: This keeps certain departments from talking to each other.
• Very granular control. This is a big product meaning you can get very detailed with it.
• Once it's configured and running, we hardly ever have any issues.

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

• The only thing missing is the ability to cancel a backup as they appear to just continue to try to run even after rebooting the BDR and endpoint until a failure finally occurs.
• The only other ask would be to expand support to Linux operating systems.

Incentivized

• Its configuration options were very large and required a good deal of time to learn all of the various settings.

Incentivized

We've been using Axcient over the years and have worked with their development team to suggest new features, something that you would not normally be able to do with other companies. They listen to what we have to say and understand that we are a business, just like them. It's great to know that someone will always be there for you when you need them.

Incentivized

It's the only product at this time that meets all of our requirements.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It is overall very easy to install and get working. Install the application, select the drives you want to backup or leave blank and backup all drives. It starts to run immediately. You configure all the backup retention and how often to run in the portal so once you deploy the agent it is very easy to get started. After the backup completes. The portal will perform a test boot and auto verification of the image.

Incentivized

Support is pretty good. The issue is that they don't have any SLA so they get to you whenever. Though, if you hound them, they usually bump you up in the chain and get back to you. Their techs are fairly knowledgeable. Occasionally the first level support isn't the best, but once it bumps up to the next level, they are good.

Incentivized

I had the miss fortune to go back to this device. Alot has changed since the first time I had used it. Now instead a full deployable network appliance, you have to download a preconfigured virtual machine that will only run on an ESXi server. What about Hyper-V? I have many clients that are Hyper-V only. I setup a test lab to get this thing up and running and it has been a nightmare to say the least. Will be looking at other options.

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

Security and encryption of Axcient is a top priority . Axcient have all the tools to provide solutions to different kind of businesses Best part is it has an MSP friendly console to manage multiples devices and clients at the same Dashboard. Deployment process is very easy in Windows an VMWare Devices.

This was the only appliance of its kind that I have used. Other devices have different capabilities for web filtering such as the checkpoint firewalls, but none of them offered the overall solution that was deployed with this product at 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

• The few customers I have I feel confident and comfortable that a disaster will make recovery easy and fast for my clients.
• I can set it up and forget about it with reports and alerts
• I recommend it to any client that requires a good solid backup solution;

• Faster investigative work has led to increased employee efficiency when working on security investigations.

Incentivized