Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
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Hitachi Enterprise Cloud
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Hitachi Vantara offers the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud, an infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Hitachi provides a full portfolio of integrated hardware, software and enablement services designed to bring a pre-engineered level of efficiency and predictability to creating a cloud platform.
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
1) If you are gathering lots of data from many different points and transforming that data into something customized, and you need it secure yet accessible, this is a great option. 2) If you are looking for a platform and not just a service provider, this would be a great option. As a platform, there is a one-stop-shop feeling that gets you some better customer service and performance. But it also locks you into one provider, so don’t jump in if you feel like you’ll want a lot of flexibility. 3) Building or running VMware is really what this platform is all about. If you’re creating an app drawing from some complex data/sources, it’s an easier go with this tool than most others.
Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
It fills a niche that was needed before we as a company fully embraced the cloud with Azure. It was a great introduction to the cloud and there are some features I wish were more readily available with some of our Azure tools. Staying on top of your expenses is much harder without the transparency Hitachi provides.
It allows the small team managing it to simplify cloud operations using prebuilt computing and storage templates. Very easy to monitor, manage and optimize cloud operations.
Pre-Engineered, turnkey solutions with prebuilt services make it quick and easy to select the service needed for each app. With many different suppliers, we cater to many different connectors.
Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
Their ability to offer a public cloud solution that feels like a private cloud solution is a great feature, but not one that is easily understood outside of someone using the tool. I think they need more training and marketing around what they can do for cloud-native development.
I think they are lacking a solution to play in other playgrounds easily. Many of their offerings are better than what Azure provides, so I think there is room for them to leverage Azure size with customized, personalized features.
They really need something big to set them apart from the larger players in this space. I think of Snowflake with their amazing pricing model and the “oops!” button that undoes serious accidental deletes. Something like that would grow the user base and make it a major player.
It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Hitachi Enterprise Cloud is a pleasant surprise, offering better management and control of your cloud containers and VMware. It is a platform and contains all you need to get going, so there is great appeal in smaller companies and isolated divisions/departments in larger companies. If I were managing a small group with a specific endpoint I would no doubt choose a solution like this, but being a large corporation we tend to drive towards larger solutions with internal competencies to support those larger roll-outs.
It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
The positive pricing aspect has been with the rate card and compute pricing transparency, being better able to manage the budget.
It is a small solution for us, so we are probably not realizing the potential savings we could get by rolling all our corporate cloud work into a single solution, but it is also good to keep multiple irons in the fire, so to speak.
The implementation has done very well in a small, controlled atmosphere. So while the ROI may not have been as high as we’d like to see, the success of the project has made it valuable none the less.
