The following blog highlights a recent report, GigaOm Radar for Alternatives to Amazon AWS S3 for Evaluating Public Cloud Object Storage.
Object storage is inexpensive, scalable, and allows massive amounts of unstructured data to be readily accessible and more easily analyzed. Available in the cloud and on premises, object storage is ideal for unstructured data can and very popular for backup, archiving, content management, file-based and cloud-native applications, and big data lakes, reports GigaOm. AWS’s Simple Storage Service (S3) has quickly become a standard protocol for object storage but there are competitive alternatives from leading cloud providers.
Why Do Organizations Need S3 Alternatives?
While S3 is inexpensive compared to other storage options available from AWS, its performance is not always consistent and the real cost is not always obvious. Data transfer fees like ingress and egress, data protection and locality, storage tiers, and IO operations all contribute to unpredictable pricing says GigaOm. Organizations are finding that the pricing complexity and performance of the S3 can make it difficult to plan for the future. For these reasons, organizations are looking for alternative object storage solutions. “The egress costs of public cloud services are what worry CFOs and project managers the most, limiting flexibility in the execution of a multi-cloud strategy,” GigaOm reports.
Zadara named “Leader’ and ‘Outperformer’
GigaOm says the most common metrics for evaluating S3 alternatives are cost predictability, performance, multi-cloud compatibility, and Lock-in avoidance. For the Radar Report, GigaOm analyzed 11 object storage providers. They focused on essential categories like Security, Geographic availability, pricing and business model, partner ecosystem and multi-tiering capabilities.
Of the leading S3 alternatives evaluated, GigaOm ranked Zadara a “Leader’ and ‘Outperformer’ for its object storage-as a service. Zadara earned its top spot for strong multi-tenancy, enterprise-grade features, and security. Available on-premises and multi-cloud Storage as a Service (STaaS) solution, Zadara is independent from the cloud provider. Zadara performed well in the following areas:
- Simple and highly predictable pricing.
- Highly configurable in terms of data protection, with two- or three-way replication and erasure coding. Caters to Small/Medium businesses, Enterprise customers and Specialized workloads/use cases.
- Security features like data encrypted both at rest and in transit, using encryption keys handled directly by the customers.
- Object immutability is supported as well, adding an additional level of protection against ransomware attacks.
- True private cloud storage solution that can span multiple clouds and on-premises infrastructures, including Amazon AWS.
How does your existing solution stack up?