Reliable data storage and access is a big challenge in AI applications and IBM ESS is a service you need to solve the problem. If you are building an AI service and you already use the IBM ecosystem for AI compute requirements, ESS can serve as an excellent software based storage solution. Integration with other platforms such as EMR/Databricks is still a challenge and should be improved.
If you are using NV for backups and restores, it does the job very well. You can rely on the functions and time it as you prefer it to be executed. They have a great plug-in library which provides integrations of many applications and many databases. The updated versions support better job creations and restorations. You can easily depend on your backups without a hassle. However if you go ahead with its advanced features, you many need further support. Would not recommend using the Cleaning Tape module.There are issues in the reports provided. Also you may face with disk latency issues.
IBM ESS is optimized for AI and Big Data usecases while S3 is a general purpose storage solutions. EMR and Databricks have lakehouse/data warehousing solutions for distributed computing but are more optimized for just the big data pipelining solutions and not essentially for AI usecases, especially for inference, when you need to load model artifacts really quickly.
Pricing was on point with our requirement. A great deal compared to the other products we evaluated. We had recommendations from existing users in the region. Since our requirement was basic backups and restores and NV provided that, we were compelled to go with it as the implementation was very very easy.