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AWS is clearly the leader in the cloud computing market, including the cloud storage market. Even in the highly competitive public cloud market, AWS is considered a top choice in application development, analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, cloud-native applications and general business applications.
All of these features, while not storage itself, may be combined with a storage offering. So AWS’s overall depth as a cloud vendor is a big plus for its storage platform.
Amazon S3 is the leader in revenue and amount of data under management. Its S3 API gives it control of a vast ecosystem of developers and storage vendors. This makes it a top candidate for just about any organization considering cloud storage.
However, prices have not decreased much as of late. This may mean there are sometimes cheaper options. Therefore, smaller, more cost-focused businesses may not favor AWS for storage.
Furthermore, businesses need to spend over a certain dollar amount (which is not disclosed) to get personalized service. This is yet another reason that smaller firms may look to smaller cloud storage providers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon. It is a cloud-focused service provider, which pioneered the cloud IaaS market in 2006 with the introduction of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It is publicly traded. Customers include Netflix, LinkedIn, Facebook ,Turner Broadcasting, BBC , and ESPN.
AWS owns almost half of the cloud storage market. It offers a complete range of cloud storage services. It is used by the likes of the U.S. federal government, 21st Century Fox, Netflix, Discovery, Airbnb, Lyft, Pinterest, GE, Johnson & Johnson, and BP.
Multiple sets of redundant data centers in regions across the U.S., as well as in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, U.K., Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Brazil.
It also has one region dedicated to the U.S. federal government, and two China regions. Languages include English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish.
File, block and object.
Amazon offers the biggest range of object, file, and block cloud storage options, as well as many cloud data migration choices, and the most ISV and integrator partnerships. This ecosystem is supported by an infrastructure built on multiple availability zones and regions that other cloud storage vendors struggle to compete with.
“S3 is well suited for both big and little data repositories of objects, ranging from backup to archive to active video images and much more,” said Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group.
Anyone with a credit card can sign up and start storing data in S3 in a few minutes. Programmers can use online documentation for the API SDKs or AWS console, or a command line interface.
In addition, the AWS Storage Gateway is a software appliance that links an on-premises environment to Amazon cloud storage. It offers local storage with connectivity to AWS Cloud storage, and helps with migration, bursting and storage tiering use cases.
However, optimal usage of AWS storage services requires an array of sophisticated skills that many enterprises lack. Users often require professional services from AWS-focused managed service providers to fill the skills gap.
“The service is well documented and very easy to use. The management interface is great,” said an SQL developer in finance.
Other users, noted, though, that the web interface could be frustrating when dealing with large numbers of files.
The simplest way is to copy and paste data from a local computer into the service over the Internet. For larger amounts of data:
AWS can move up to 1 EB of data in an AWS Snowmobile. A typical Snowball job moves 80 TB in about a week. Direct Connect depends on WAN conditions and availability.
AWS provides 99.99% availability and 99.9999999% durability for object storage. AWS does not give an availability SLA, though with EBS snapshots, versioning and cross-region replication capabilities, users can place copies of data in multiple regions around the globe to protect against accidental or malicious deletions.
AWS offers tech support as well as AWS Professional Services for custom engagements.
User comments on technical support are positive.
“Tech support always met my expectations,” said a government IT manager.
Amazon S3 provides various levels of security and compliance, as well as customer guidance to prevent Amazon S3 buckets and objects from allowing public access. Multiple security controls are put in place to prevent data leakage.
Organizations such as Capital One have stated that they are more secure in AWS than in their own data centers, and multiple branches of highly sensitive government agencies depend on AWS.
Amazon S3 provides multiple tags for objects to manage, inventory, and analyze data in place with SQL tools. Analytics and machine learning services can be applied to data.
Storage management services include creating a lifecycle policy, creating cross-Region replication rules, managing cross-Region replication rules, configuring storage class analysis, configuring Amazon S3 inventory, configuring request metrics, and configuring a request metrics filter.
“We were able to replace internal and expensive document storage and replace it with cheaper offline storage,” said a BI architect in retail. “Speed, size, and security are the most valuable features.”
Varies base on requirements and region. S3 storage in the U.S. starts at $0.023 per GB with Amazon Glacier at $0.004 per GB.
See an in-depth look at Amazon S3 pricing, with prices broken down by region, storage request, and data transfer.
| Vendor | |
|---|---|
| Locations | US, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, UK, Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, China |
| Storage Type | File, block, object |
| Differentiator | Biggest providers with best range of object, file, and block cloud storage options |
| Performance | IOPS: 80,000 90 MB/s |
| Availability | 99.99% |
| Gartner MQ Rating | Leader |
| Pricing | S3 storage starts at $0.023 per GB, Amazon Glacier $0.004 per GB |
| Vendor | |
|---|---|
| Locations | US, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, UK, Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, China |
| Storage Type | File, block, object |
| Differentiator | Biggest providers with best range of object, file, and block cloud storage options |
| Performance | IOPS: 80,000 90 MB/s |
| Availability | 99.99% |
| Gartner MQ Rating | Leader |
| Pricing | S3 storage starts at $0.023 per GB, Amazon Glacier $0.004 per GB |
Drew Robb is a contributing writer for Datamation, Enterprise Storage Forum, eSecurity Planet, Channel Insider, and eWeek. He has been reporting on all areas of IT for more than 25 years. He has a degree from the University of Strathclyde UK (USUK), and lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.
Enterprise Storage Forum offers practical information on data storage and protection from several different perspectives: hardware, software, on-premises services and cloud services. It also includes storage security and deep looks into various storage technologies, including object storage and modern parallel file systems. ESF is an ideal website for enterprise storage admins, CTOs and storage architects to reference in order to stay informed about the latest products, services and trends in the storage industry.
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