Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Intradyn

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

Intradyn works well for a small to medium business like ours that just needs to keep an archive of every email sent or received throughout our organization. It's easy to search for emails, whether you're looking for keywords, sender, recipient, subject, body, header, etc. The Outlook plugin works well for end users.

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

• Intuitive User Interface
• Outlook Plugin is very handy
• LDAP Integration is nice

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

• Outlook plugin is great, but I wish it could somehow update user passwords when users change them via Active Directory. In our environment, users have to change their AD passwords every 45 days, but the Outlook plugin doesn't capture the change, so the next time the user tries to search the archive via the plugin, the plugin doesn't work. Since our users aren't accessing the archive that often, they easily forget that they've changed their password since they last accessed the archive and need support.

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

• 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

• Peace of mind...not having to worry about lost emails
• Allows managers to review correspondence of their subordinates for quality assurance

Incentivized