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Amazon Web Services (AWS) Logo
29,503 views|25,126 comparisons
Dell Technologies Logo
6,715 views|5,730 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 31, 2022

We performed a comparison between Amazon AWS and Dell ECS based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: For the most part, users of both Amazon AWS and Dell ECS feel that they are pretty easy to deploy. However, some users felt that their deployments could be somewhat complex.
  • Features: Users of both Amazon AWS and Dell ECS agree that they are both highly stable and scalable solutions.

    Reviewers say that Amazon AWS is very user-friendly and has good supporting documentation. However, they feel that it trades off its user-friendliness by not having the best security.

    Dell ECS allows users to balance their workloads. However, users feel that the documentation that would make it easier to use is incomplete. This results in the solution being more difficult for users to deploy.
  • Pricing: Users of both products mainly feel that their pricing could be more competitive. That said, there are also some users of both solutions who feel that the pricing is competitive.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions note that, for the most part, their technical support teams are excellent.

Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Amazon AWS seems to be the marginally superior solution. Our reviewers found Dell ECS’s supporting documentation to be incomplete.

To learn more, read our detailed Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We write a lot of Lambda functions for various services, as well as serverless functions.""IaaS with easy management and rapid implementation using Python Django Mezzanine.""There are many valuable features, I find the EMR in the platform easy to use and to learn.""Easy to deploy through the channel model for serverless architecture and easy to integrate through the organization model.""Technical support has been great.""I like S3, load balancers, and Route 53.""The main reason why we use EC2 is because we are not dependent on maintaining the hardware inside our premises. Also, we have full control over the infrastructure, and we can modify it as per our own requirements.""As a service vendor, we have helped clients to achieve faster "go to market" on their products, and have provided highly flexible cost-effective system management solutions."

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"The scalability is good.""What I like best about Dell ECS is its stability. I also like that you can use it for large-scale data purposes. The solution works fine for me, and I haven't encountered any issues with it.""This product is very competitive.""The performance is good.""It is 100% stable. It is also scalable.""It's definitely good for unstructured data. In earlier days, we had Centera, so for the DR it's really good. It has load balancing facility, and we're using it with the Kemp Load Balancer.""The most valuable feature for me is off-site storage.""Competitive object storage platform that's stable and scalable."

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Cons
"The pricing could be more competitive.""The setup of the solution is not so easy, it requires various skills to complete it. The whole implementation can take a month.""Amazon AWS could improve on security.""In some scenarios, Azure will support hybrid cloud better while AWS offers direct connection.""The pricing of the solution could be better. It's a little pricey.""I generally don't like the user experience of Amazon. It's not the best.""The solution is pretty mature.""An integrated platform would make it easier for administrators to monitor and manage."

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"The initial setup is not so easy.""The major weakness in the solution is that there is no cloud version for Dell ECS.""They could provide centralized reports.""They need to ensure that the system will work if a site goes down.""The solution could be more cost-effective and secure.""Dell EMC ECS could improve by having Relational Database Services(RDS) to review progress. Additionally, if the training was provided it would be a benefit, it would be good for our engineers.""You should be able to calculate so that when it's full it's 100% full, not just 90%.""Dell ECS could improve the price of the solution. It is expensive."

More Dell ECS Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Be careful with your consumption, especially when you are testing things. Costs can creep up on you relatively fast, without even noticing."
  • "AWS is scalable depending on your needs so pricing is dependant on what you use."
  • "It is decently priced. The competition is also bringing its own cloud offerings, such as from Oracle."
  • "When we shifted the load to AWS we paid a high cost as the mail stores were hosted on EBS. The storage cost drastically reduced after moving to S3."
  • "If you can plan capacity for one or three years, you can use the upfront payment option which allows you to save up to 50%."
  • "One of the best thing in Amazon AWS is you are billed for the service you use."
  • "We are reducing costs year-over-year."
  • "Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost."
  • More Amazon AWS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Dell EMC ECS is too expensive."
  • "We are not paying for the license at this stage."
  • "The solution could be cheaper."
  • "It's a lease-based model, so it's capacity-based. We already negotiated the price a lot, but we're still doing that with Dell because somehow the product was not installed successfully, so there was a lot of struggle in the distributor territory between Dell and the environment itself. I would give the solution a 6 out of 10 for the pricing. There's a little room for improvement."
  • "We initially purchased all of the licenses at the same time."
  • "The price of Dell ECS should be reduced."
  • "The price of Dell ECS should be reduced."
  • "The charges for this solution are made in blocks of models, which are purchased depending on what features an organization requires."
  • More Dell ECS Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for alluring IT customers. This article give brief history of these cloud hosting service providers and compares the cloud services provided by them. -- Amazon Web Services -- It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services - including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform - the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example. There are some cautions for Amazon though. Namely, its cloud has experienced three major outages in two years. One analyst, Jillian Mirandi of Technology Business Researcher, has suggested that continued outages could eventually start hindering businesses' willingness to invest in Amazon infrastructure. That sentiment gets to a larger point about AWS though - the service seems to be popular in the startup community, providing the IT… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or is… more »
    Top Answer:How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can be… more »
    Top Answer:We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful… more »
    Top Answer:More features for remote management and administration could be included in the product. They could provide centralized reports.
    Ranking
    Views
    29,503
    Comparisons
    25,126
    Reviews
    25
    Average Words per Review
    531
    Rating
    7.8
    5th
    Views
    6,715
    Comparisons
    5,730
    Reviews
    11
    Average Words per Review
    368
    Rating
    8.1
    Comparisons
    Linode logo
    Compared 29% of the time.
    OpenShift logo
    Compared 11% of the time.
    Microsoft Azure logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    SAP Cloud Platform logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    IBM Public Cloud logo
    Compared 3% of the time.
    Dell PowerScale (Isilon) logo
    Compared 20% of the time.
    NetApp StorageGRID logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    MinIO logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    Red Hat Ceph Storage logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Scality RING logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Also Known As
    Amazon Web Services, AWS
    EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, EMC Elastic Cloud Storage
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

    The most common use cases for AWS are:

    • Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

    • Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.

    • Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.

    • Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.

    • Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.

    • Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

    Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

    • Analytics
    • Application integration
    • Blockchain
    • Business applications
    • Cloud financial management
    • Compute
    • Contact center
    • Containers
    • Database
    • Developer tools
    • End-user computing
    • Front-end web and mobile
    • Games
    • Internet of Things (IoT)
    • Machine learning
    • Management and governance
    • Quantum technologies
    • Robotics
    • Satellite
    • Security, identity and compliance, and others

    The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

    Amazon AWS Features

    The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

    • Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.

    • Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.

    • Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.

    • Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.

    • Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

    • Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

    Amazon AWS Benefits

    This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

    • High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.

    • The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.

    • Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.

    • The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.

    • AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.

    • Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.

    • Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

    A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

    Enterprise-ready. Future-proof. Data-first.

    Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is a file and object storage solution from Dell EMC. ECS has been created to support both traditional and next-generation ecosystems equally. ECS boasts unrivaled economics, manageability, resilience, and scalability to satisfy the demands of today's next-gen, robust business enterprise ecosystems. ECS can easily be deployed in a software-defined model or as a turn-key appliance. ECS is software-defined and multi-layered for unlimited scalability. Every layer is abstracted and scalable with no single point of failure.

    • Data service layer: Provides S3 access along with access to SWIFT, CAZ, NFS, HDFS.
    • Storage service layer: Stores, retrieves and protects data.
    • Fabric layer: Provides clustering, configuration management, health monitoring.

    Everything is done within the software, which is containerized, using docker.

    ECS is currently deployed using basic commodity hardware, which can easily be federated across as many as eight different locations and managed as a single resource. Additionally, ECS can also protect data at the site level, locally, disk, node, and rack levels. The federation enables a single global namespace with everywhere access to content. Applications can quickly rewrite in an active/active or everywhere active manner.

    ECS is also able to be used as secondary storage or archival storage. This will free up valuable primary storage of data that is stale, redundant, or used infrequently, and the data will remain easily accessible. ECS uses policy-based tiering such as Data Domain, Cloud tiering, Isilon using cloud polls, and Geodrive, which give Windows systems direct access to ECS. Windows users can still use server message block (SMB) while leveraging the more expansive ECS storage.

    ECS is enterprise-grade and offers valuable features such as retention, multi-tenancy, metering, monitoring, quotas, and more. ECS builds in robust security from the ground up and encrypts data. ECS is compliant with STIG guidelines and adheres to SEC rule 17A-4F.

    ECS is an enterprise-ready solution that allows organizations to easily simplify object storage management and visualize information in intuitive new ways, and empowers your business to do even more with data. With ECS, enterprise organizations can deliver cloud-scale economics in-house that will lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and scale, creating greater levels of productivity and profitability.

    Reviews from Real Users

    One user, who is a deputy director at a tech service company, says ECS offers “good performance, reliability, and technical support”.

    Dell EMC ECS is “a stable solution which is easy to scale, install and manage”, relates another user, who is a senior buyer at a tech service company.

    "What I like best about this product is that it is a complete solution, both hardware, and software, by the same vendor," summarizes a system engineer at a tech services company. 














    Sample Customers
    Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
    Atos
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company31%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization22%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Financial Services Firm30%
    Mining And Metals Company10%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    Buyer's Guide
    Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Amazon AWS is ranked 2nd in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) with 250 reviews while Dell ECS is ranked 5th in File and Object Storage with 24 reviews. Amazon AWS is rated 8.4, while Dell ECS is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Amazon AWS writes "Reliable with good security but is difficult to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell ECS writes "Scalable and stable object storage platform, with good storage group functionality". Amazon AWS is most compared with Linode, OpenShift, Microsoft Azure, SAP Cloud Platform and IBM Public Cloud, whereas Dell ECS is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), NetApp StorageGRID, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Scality RING.

    We monitor all Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.