Azure Blob Storage is well suited for cases where you are working with different data formats and looking for cost-effective storage solutions based on access frequency. Another area of strength is the encryption of data at rest, and encryption can be managed on your own. However, it may not be appropriate for transferring large data very fast.
The NetApp StorageGRID solution fits in perfectly with what our company was trying to accomplish. Our goal was to free up our expensive storage flash (SSD) capacity for our critical applications to allow for growth and added performance capabilities. I do not believe this solution would be greatly suited for those without a Cloud solution or secondary site/system to tier data.
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.
If we are transferring huge amount of data (outbound), it can get quite expensive.
With new features being added constantly, although a good thing, at times it becomes difficult to keep up with the changes. Documentation needs to keep UpToDate and should include best practices.
Performance can be improved especially when it comes to cold storage.
Blob storage is fairly simple, with several different options/settings that can be configured. The file explorer has enhanced its usability. Some areas could be improved, such as providing more details or stats on how many times a file has been accessed. It is an obvious choice if you're already using Azure/Entra.
Documentation sometimes appears to be out of date or not fully documented properly with new releases. It is like documentation comes out for a specific version and is quickly out of date. Another issue is documentation is scarce on new releases and only seems to get properly updated (and sometimes is still wrong) once enough people hit the forums to complain.
NetApp Support was able to quickly resolve a networking issue during the deployment of the NetApp StorageGRID system, which we, unfortunately, could not figure out on our own. Not only did Support engage quickly, but they also provided guidance on how to properly troubleshoot various issues such as the one we encountered and also provided excellent documentation.
Blob storage lets us control the file source/hosting and retain everything within our Microsoft ecosystem. Blob is less feature-rich than some of the other products. Still, we consider it as a value-added product included within our environment, and alternative products are not needed for our requirements. Keeping the hosting within our tenant locale is vital to us.
We chose NetApp StorageGRID because we were not looking for a true backup solution but wanted the features to included a DR centric ideology. The IBM Cloud Backup solution was purely backup focused and did not fit the requirements for our needs. NetApp StorageGRID checked all of our boxes in regards to cost, use case, and ease of manageability.
