Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Sonian (discontinued)

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

We have had a couple of legal inquiries which required us to review emails for a user or users. Using the Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service, we have been able to perform searches quickly, narrowing or expanding the search criteria is easy, resulting in exactly what we were looking for. This has saved us with claims for collections, as well as a couple of legal HR matters. It is my trusted go to application.

• 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

• Sonian search is rightly praised for ease of use, scale, performance and accuracy.
• Sonian archive can be deployed rapidly without the need for costly professional service engagements.
• Seamless process to import PST files into the archive.
• Sonian has a high focus on compliance and governance which is reflected with their fast and accurate search function.

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

• Speed is slow sometimes
• The Outlook plugin does not always find all emails when searching

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

Incentivized

It performs as expected with no exceptions.

We only need support when initially setting it up. We really have not had to call for user or help support on this product. It has always worked and is always easy to use.

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

Sonian is a pure SaaS solution and is easy to manage and use. It's cost effective and does exactly what it says on the tin

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 been able to reduce a lot of store space by moving all PST files to the archiver.
• Users love how easy it is to find old emails that were deleted long ago.
• Some users now rely on this service