Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. IBM Aspera on Cloud

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.

Incentivized

In one specific situation I had to quickly transfer about ten files really fast that were really large but my colleague from another company only had Aspera and it worked so well with no errors and was so fast. It was really helpful to get our promo done with our strict deadline.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ease of use: the Graphical User Interface doesn't require technical know-how to operate
• Delivery Receipts: this allows us the confidence to know our files have reached our customers
• Activity Monitor: lets you know how much data you have used, which is important for budgeting reasons.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Track upload/download usage OVERALL to know how much space is left
• Track cloud storage overall to know how much space is left
• More easily send single links to users for download, rather than full access (I know it is possible, but it is not intuitive)

Incentivized

Due to princing, availability and scalability.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

My experience with Aspera applications and with other vendors. My score will go to 8 as soon as AoC's Files App has the Search Through Sub-folders feature. We want to remove Aspera Shares, which has an older inefficient user interface.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The support from IBM is fast and reliable. Very knowledgeable engineers provide you with the support on Aspera. We had a very good experience when opened tickets and we were able to get our issues resolved quickly. Most solutions are provided within a day so you can expect a quick turnaround time. Overall, the support has been very good.

Incentivized

The service provided by the authorized vendor was excellent. It was a good collaboration between the vendor IT team and internal IT team. They provided us with a timeline and we verified and approved that timeline. Daily stand ups and weekly meetups were conducted to update the internal team on progress. They were able to deliver all deliverables on time also, they conducted both alpha testing and beta version testing in time. Overall, they were able to complete the implementation in the given timeline.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

These cloud storage products deliver sufficient space to store data and access and have an array of ways to transfer this data and keep it secure. IBM Aspera on Cloud focuses on the transfer and makes it a lot faster mainly due to its patented tech and altered UDP protocol. Since most of production code uses IBM services, it was natural to go with IBM Aspera on Cloud.

• 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.

Incentivized

• IBM Aspera has allowed us to scale our file-based deliveries to several terabytes across thousands of assets per month.
• IBM Aspera has allowed us to deliver reliably without many issues, increasing operational efficiency.
• IBM Aspera has allowed us to deliver materials on time, which has had a direct and positive impact on our content consumption.

Incentivized