Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Hitachi Content Platform (HCP)

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

• [Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) is] well suited for needs requiring a highly secure, multi-tenant on-premise object store.
• Exceeds expectations with respect to object level attributes and permissions
• Has excellent S3/HS3 REST API feature set
• Situations which require versioning and proven Immutability (certified by Governments)

- Expensive to use for general file storage publishing where meta data, compliance, retention, versioning are unnecessary.

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

• HCP/HDI interface works like charm. it's easy to deploy and scale.
• Hitachi customer support is at par with expectations
• More cost effective than EMC/NetApp solutions.

Incentivized

• Accessing data stored in Glacier is slow. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it is undesirable nonetheless.
• Retrieving a large amount of data can be expensive; Glacier's intended use is as an archive of rarely-accessed data.
• Some users regard Glacier with fear and uncertainty. Slow retrieval time and high retrieval cost are the greatest risks of using Glacier, and they are also the Glacier interaction that most users have the least experience with.

Incentivized

• Cost structure is by capacity and is expensive
• Some access settings are mutually exclusive for performance (REST vs. CIFS)
• QoS by Tenant requires use of external ADC (Hitachi suggested and sold us Pulse Secure) and their support on this product offering is not up to their normally high standard

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

My company has close ties with Hitachi. NetApp chargeback was more per Gig and for cost saving purposes, we had to choose HCP.

Incentivized

• Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
• Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.

Incentivized

• Best on premise solution of its' kind that encapsulates all our needs
• ROI has been positive but it does raise questions at renewal time in terms of cost/GB vs other 2nd tier storage types

Incentivized