Amazon S3 vs StorSimple

Likelihood to Recommend

S3 can be used to store your application logs or objects that need to be frequently accessed. It can also be used in conjunction with AWS Glue for data transformation tasks or to host a static website. The entire Simple Monthly Calculator service of AWS is hosted on S3. S3 would not be recommended for use as a database service or where the change needs to be reflected instantly. Since S3 provides eventual consistency, there is no guarantee that an update made by someone will actually be seen by someone accessing the same object just after. This is in contrast to a database wherein if a change is committed, it will start showing instantly to everyone else.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 201-500 employees

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Onsite storage needs and backing up to Azure.

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Scott Lerner

Director of IT

Graham-Field Health ProductsHospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees

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Pros

Excellent support of Identity and access management makes sure that your objects are used by the intended audience only.
Entire service is accessible through commands and API. It makes integration and orchestration of S3 services really easy and automated.
S3 has quite good reliability and durability to make sure all requests are successfully fulfilled and your objects are always safe.
This service and UI interface is easy to understand. It takes almost no learning curve to consume this service.
The amount of flexibility it provides, I find it really cost-effective.

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Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect

InfostretchInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Performance via the SSD drives.
Writes back to our Private Cloud via Azure.
Easy to Admin via Web client interface.

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Scott Lerner

Director of IT

Graham-Field Health ProductsHospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees

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Cons

It's genuinely hard to fault S3 so I'll have to resort to nitpicking but their main interface is quite bland, still super easy to use and navigate, just bland.
Contacting their support can be quite cumbersome as every ticket is sent through the always cumbersome Amazon hierarchy of internal bureaucracy (similar to Seller Central) but it's not the worst system in the world by any means.
At this point, I'm almost out of critiques - after all, it's what huge digital entertainment companies like Netflix rely on to make a living. That being said, there's always room for improvement and perhaps creating more servers around the world would decrease their minimal send and retrieval times.

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Verified User

Employee in Marketing

Retail Company, 11-50 employees

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Additional fail-over functionality

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Scott Lerner

Director of IT

Graham-Field Health ProductsHospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

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StorSimple 10.0

Based on 1 answer

If I wanted to use just onsite storage the StorSimple device is already paid for.

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Scott Lerner

Director of IT

Graham-Field Health ProductsHospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees

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Usability

Amazon S3 8.8

Based on 5 answers

The AWS S3 API is translated into every language you can think of, and is very powerful. However, the split of features into the AWS CLI -> S3 and AWS CLI -> S3API causes some confusion when dealing with complex uploading and metadata.

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Jonathan Kempf, UXC

Lead Frontend Engineer

MaisonetteApparel & Fashion, 11-50 employees

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Support

Amazon S3 8.5

Based on 15 answers

Overall, Amazon S3 has worked out great for our organization. It has enabled us to build out a centralized storage solutions for fraction of the cost that a on-prem solution would have required. If properly managed S3 is a great asset to any organization. There a few small things that need improvement like the UI and storage monitoring but over it's been great.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Media Production Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

There are alternatives, Google Cloud Storage and Azure storage are the only real rivals, in my opinion, although most hosting vendors have their own flavor of an S3 like utility. However, most of those are actually just sub-vendors of S3. The most compelling case for using something else over Amazon is that S3 is a pretty significant point of failure in the general internet network as a whole. On the other hand, using Google Cloud Storage or Azure feels a little bit like using a windows phone in 2015 – you just knew it didn't have a great future.

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Justin Schroeder

Partner & Senior Engineer

Braid, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

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Easy to use and highly compatible with our MSFT Hyper-V environment

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Scott Lerner

Director of IT

Graham-Field Health ProductsHospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees

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Return on Investment

S3 is such a great way to store things, it's a little hard to measure all the benefits against the other options (Dropbox, hard drives in laptops etc), but it gives a simple place to store pretty much anything.
We did replace a traditional LEMP-stack website service with static website hosting in S3 + javascript. This vastly reduced our running costs as we turned all the websites EC2 instances and Load Balancers off. It also meant we didn't have to look after or maintain autoscaling strategies anymore because S3 handles the scaling for us.

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