Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Azure StorSimple 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

Onsite storage needs and backing up to Azure.

Incentivized

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

• Performance via the SSD drives.
• Writes back to our Private Cloud via Azure.
• Easy to Admin via Web client interface.

Incentivized

• 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

• Additional fail-over functionality

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

If I wanted to use just onsite storage the StorSimple device is already paid for.

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

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

Easy to use and highly compatible with our MSFT Hyper-V environment

Incentivized

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

• Great Folks on the MSFT Implementation team
• Great value on year 2

Incentivized

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

Incentivized