Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. IBM Aspera on Cloud

For archiving old data that is infrequently accessed it is perfect. You can choose to let it go into cold/glacier storage which saves even further costs but at the expense of accessibility. I like that you can set access rules to automatically move it to the next storage tier after a certain amount of time that it has not been accessed. I also use it a lot with PHP via the API. We have some custom in-house applications that have a fair amount of data uploaded into them. S3 has been a perfect solution to store these files, taking the load off web servers and never having issues with running out of storage.

Incentivized

Barring the cost-prohibitive nature of some of the IBM Aspera solutions, IBM Aspera on Cloud is the appropriate solution for many file transfer workloads. Even at smaller volumes and lighter-weight files, Aspera's Hot Folder automation is a well-built and excellent solution for most file transfer needs.

Incentivized

• Reliable and secure way to store objects in cloud: Storing any type of file(text, pdf, doc, csv, etc) is very easy with S3. Fetching this stored content as and when you require is also pretty easy and can be done using both the console and AWS CLI. Appropriate permissions can be set up for buckets using IAM roles/policies.
• Versioning in buckets: S3 gives you a very handy feature to store multiple versions of objects stored in a bucket.
• Lifecycle policies: You can set up lifecycle policies in S3 that can move your older objects to IA or Glacier. This setup is very easy and can be done within minutes for a bucket.
• Replication: The cross-region replication that S3 provides is wonderful. Beware of the inter-regional data transfer costs though.

Incentivized

• Ease of use: the Graphical User Interface doesn't require technical know-how to operate
• Delivery Receipts: this allows us the confidence to know our files have reached our customers
• Activity Monitor: lets you know how much data you have used, which is important for budgeting reasons.

Incentivized

• The biggest problem is to rename the bucket. There is no direct way to do it. One need to copy entire content to the different bucket with intended bucket name and then remove the old bucket. Sometimes it creates issues.
• There is no direct way to upload .zip file and extract it to inside the bucket.
• While uploading large files, sometimes you will find a drop of upload speed. I observe it so many times and while checking my internet speed, I find it absolutely perfect. So there must have something wrong on the AWS side.

Incentivized

• Track upload/download usage OVERALL to know how much space is left
• Track cloud storage overall to know how much space is left
• More easily send single links to users for download, rather than full access (I know it is possible, but it is not intuitive)

Incentivized

Due to princing, availability and scalability.

Incentivized

The UI could have some improvements (better filters) and there is a lack of some useful functionality, such as renaming an existing bucket: the latter is much needed in the context of rapidly evolving companies. Overall though, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is easy to use and to onboard people and tools to, thanks to its various APIs and flexibility.

Incentivized

My experience with Aspera applications and with other vendors. My score will go to 8 as soon as AoC's Files App has the Search Through Sub-folders feature. We want to remove Aspera Shares, which has an older inefficient user interface.

Incentivized

It depends on your tier within Amazon on how great of support you get. For us we have a dedicated Point of Contact that is great in taking in what we need and discussing it with the S3 team. The best thing is features we need or suggest have a good chance of landing on their roadmap.

Incentivized

The support from IBM is fast and reliable. Very knowledgeable engineers provide you with the support on Aspera. We had a very good experience when opened tickets and we were able to get our issues resolved quickly. Most solutions are provided within a day so you can expect a quick turnaround time. Overall, the support has been very good.

Incentivized

The service provided by the authorized vendor was excellent. It was a good collaboration between the vendor IT team and internal IT team. They provided us with a timeline and we verified and approved that timeline. Daily stand ups and weekly meetups were conducted to update the internal team on progress. They were able to deliver all deliverables on time also, they conducted both alpha testing and beta version testing in time. Overall, they were able to complete the implementation in the given timeline.

Incentivized

S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web. It has direct competitors from Google and Azure, as well as a bunch of other competitors that focus on different aspects. For example, Backblaze specializes on file backups, and while s3 can also be used for that, Backblaze provides a better price point in exchange for more focused functionality. S3 really shines in that it performs simple things astonishingly well, while also being flexible enough to stretch itself to other situations (data lakes, file mounts, backup/restores systems, web hosting, etc.).

Incentivized

Teams can be really slow and the downloads sometimes come out corrupted or the program will just quit or it doesn't seem to like all files to download. While IBM Aspera is more universal and versatile with the files it downloads. Teams might look flashy but its not the best with actually transferring important data quickly like Aspera.

Incentivized

• Allows us to store large amounts of raw traffic from data providers to allow us to view data our systems received at particular times, in order to reconstruct inputs in case of errors
• Is capable of storing very large amounts of data cheaply without material impact to our business

Incentivized

• Fast transfer of internal files means that more space available at production for more features
• Internal logs are now easier to transfer and faster to batch process, giving the ability to draw out conclusions and work on improvements faster
• Good metrics by aspera lets report creation of any transfer easy and transparent. Was previously a tiresome thing to do