Amazon S3 for Backups
March 24, 2017
Amazon S3 for Backups
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
We use Amazon S3 to store our Office365 Backups from AvePointe, We have a S3 Bucket Provisioned and replicated to a different region. We also use the S3 infrastructure in conjunction with the Amazon Storage Gateway Product which Stores our Microsoft Exchange On-Prem Legal Hold backups. This is what we are using for our storage platform for the entire enterprise for Backups. This has simplified our solution for LongTerm Off-Premise Backups.
- Geo-Replication. Even in the event of a AWS Downtime/Issue our data remained available across different Geo-Zones. You have to configure and pay for this, however, if you dont set it up you may lose access to your data.
- An S3 Bucket presented with the Storage Gateway is a great way to mount your storage volumes. This operates through a linux based appliance which connects over the cloud to your volumes and presents itself as an ISCSI Connector. You can connect to many Volumes using this appliance.
- The Cloud Monitoring is also a great tool to keep an eye on your volumes health and performance.
- Overall they do a great job in making the product as easy as possible. One feature we would like to see for our Radiology Storage is File Server Paths to use. Our Legacy Image Distribution requires full UNC Paths to the storage Shares.
- It allows for us to only use what we need for a fair cost and not have to spend many productivity man-hours on maintenance and support. It also gives us peace of mind that our data is held offsite in a secure manner.
We have evaluated for Backups products such as Buffalo Tera station, Azure Blob Storage, Nimble, and Equal Logic. Azure would be a good use for a similar use-case, however they didn't offer the Storage gateway. The on-Prem solutions either lacked performance or had too high of failures for our need. Cost also was a prohibitive characteristic.