Azure Blob Storage and Panzura - A win for the civil engineering field
February 24, 2020

Azure Blob Storage and Panzura - A win for the civil engineering field

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Blob Storage

We currently use Azure Blob Storage to back-end our Panzura implementation. We keep Azure Blob Storage files as our true source of data and Panzura file caching devices at each location that has a subset of our data. It houses all of our critical business files and does it for a substantial decrease in costs vs. our old on-prem storage. This is the primary solution we use for our core business and is used across all departments.

Pros

  • Reduced cost. We were able to reduce our storage infrastructure by several hundred terabytes by consolidating redundant copies and dedupe/compression on files.
  • Extremely high level of redundancy. We can replicate data in a variety of ways that we would never have been capable of on our own hardware.

Cons

  • Unstructured data makes it harder to conceptualize what we have but with partners like Panzura that has been a non-issue for us.
  • Not always easy to understand the different models or tiers you can pick from when purchasing.
  • Azure Blob Storage is just way cheaper than anything we could afford to do on-prem. Forecasting spend is way easier with predictable growth than it is with large capital expenditures every few years, and that ability to grow or shrink dynamically is simplifies things.
S3 seemed to be just as functional as blob storage in our analysis. The only real difference is we already were on the Microsoft platform with 365, and it was an easy system to continue to learn. That was the only real deciding factor between the two that made any difference was that we were already comfortable in the ecosystem.
Microsoft has improved its customer service standpoint over the years. The ability to chat with an issue, get a callback, schedule a call or work with an architecture team(for free) is a huge plus. I can get mentorship and guidance on where to go with my environment without pushy sales tactics. This is very refreshing. Typically support can get me to where I need to be on the first contact, which is also nice.

Do you think Azure Blob Storage delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Azure Blob Storage's feature set?

Yes

Did Azure Blob Storage live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Azure Blob Storage go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure Blob Storage again?

Yes

The only real use case we have is with caching devices using blob storage as the backend. Azure Blob Storage is phenomenal for that. Trying to eliminate your file server to use this may not go as well, though. Microsoft has other products meant to fill that option.

Comments

More Reviews of Azure Blob Storage

  1. Home
  2. Object Storage Solutions
  3. Azure Blob Storage Reviews
  4. User Review of Azure Blob Storage