Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Rackspace Email

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

If you need a trusted email hosting platform, Rackspace is definitely the way to go. Not only is it simple to use, but the help they're willing to provide is also outstanding. Whether you're upgrading (or even downgrading) a service, or have concerns over any use cases, they're great at providing assistance and being diligent to understand your needs. If you only require a simple email for only a few people, it may not be the way to go, but it's hard to beat the price they offer (and the clarity on that pricing as well).

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

• Racksapce is quick and helpful when contacted for support.
• Rackspace is easy to set up and run on various email clients.
• The service is affordable and compares well with any similar services.
• It has a nice admin panel which is easy to follow and understand.

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

• Ticket system - For the most part, it's fine, but you have to log in to see the ticket/case messages. The email notification only lets you know you have a message.
• Login speed - It takes a bit longer than what most users would like to login to the admin panel.
• Clicks to control panel - The default screen is the ticket screen. I would prefer the home page immediately include a method to get to my admin tools beyond ticket creation.

Incentivized

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

Incentivized

Honestly, if it wasn't for the way in which ticket updates are shared, it would be a ten. They provide excellent support, from sales to technical to even migration services. I've always gotten my questions answered clearly, by someone who is human. If answers were displayed via email as well, rather than just a notice that I needed to login to see a message, it would be even better.

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

• We have had little disruption with our emails. I can think of only one problem in the last three years.

Incentivized