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
Per GB Per Month
StorageGRID
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
NetApp's StorageGRID is open S3 object store to manage your unstructured data at scale.
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 NetApp StorageGRID solution fits in perfectly with what our company was trying to accomplish. Our goal was to free up our expensive storage flash (SSD) capacity for our critical applications to allow for growth and added performance capabilities. I do not believe this solution would be greatly suited for those without a Cloud solution or secondary site/system to tier data.
NetApp Support was able to quickly resolve a networking issue during the deployment of the NetApp StorageGRID system, which we, unfortunately, could not figure out on our own. Not only did Support engage quickly, but they also provided guidance on how to properly troubleshoot various issues such as the one we encountered and also provided excellent documentation.
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.
We chose NetApp StorageGRID because we were not looking for a true backup solution but wanted the features to included a DR centric ideology. The IBM Cloud Backup solution was purely backup focused and did not fit the requirements for our needs. NetApp StorageGRID checked all of our boxes in regards to cost, use case, and ease of manageability.
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.
