The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing a low cost archive storage in the cloud. According to AWS, S3 Glacier storage classes provide virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability, and they provide fast access to archive data and low cost.
$0
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Infrascale Platform
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
The Infrascale Platform is the flagship cloud storage, data protection, and disaster recovery platform from the California based company, Infrascale.
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.
The Infrascale Platform solution we have in place is certainly not cheap - I believe we are paying about $2800/month for it, though it is quite robust. We have 18TB of on-site storage available, with the same available in a secondary - remote - device for replication. They do have a wide range of products available to any size business though, so I'm sure they have cheaper offerings as well. The on-site appliance is fantastic - in that in houses your backups, but can also be utilized as an emergency piece of hardware to spin up a backup and run it in the event of your primary hardware failing. You can also traverse full backups to grab single, contained, files if you so choose. We love that feature as we must perform file recovery monthly for audit purposes.
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.
It is one of the best cloud back up data protection software and software platforms on the entire market for MSPs. There are not many other solutions that offer this level of customization and execution in the data protection and disaster recovery arena better than Infrascale. I highly recommend it for any MSP.
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.
Infrascale Platform is the most modern backup service/device we've utilized. EaseUs and Ghost were just software that would run within a Windows environment (at the time) and backup to a device that we kept on-site. EaseUs would fail quite often with Incremental backups - so I would spend a lot of time re-running full backups to ensure we didn't experience data loss in the event of a crash. Ghost was used when I was first hired at this district - so I didn't have much hands-on experience with it. But I know it was a bundled offering with Anti-Virus back when we utilized it ('07-'09ish).
Peace of mind: our entire virtual environment is backed up both onsite and offsite
As stated, it is pricey. Since we haven't needed to do anything more than basic file restores, ROI is hard to measure. A full restore of a virtual server immediately would be priceless. So, on that note, ROI is good.
