My goodness, the nickel & diming with Egnyte...
Posted by TerminallyOdd@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 14 comments
We're currently evaluating Egnyte, and after some configuration issues, I've come away really impressed. Being in the AEC sector, I've been looking for a solution to facilitate file sharing and collaboration with larger engineering and BIM models that can't be hosted on ACC and it has worked really well. The SmartCache VMs are pretty simple to spin up and the VPN-less remote access is money (SMB shares over VPN has been a point of contention for years). It also has offerings to meet certain compliance needs for secure projects along with useful security and audit trailing. It just works and as a solo IT guy managing several offices, I foresee it making my life easier than managing multiple on-prem file servers.
All that said, every conversation I have with our sales rep ends up having our quote ballooning into a small fortune. You want the BIM Specialized File Handler or Project Control add-on for some users? Nope, we'll have to add that for all users whether they need it or not. Snapshot & Recovery is basically required, but that's another add-on. Want AI features that handles files larger than a measly 20MB? Add-on. Licenses are only sold in bundles of 5, quantity can't be reduced, a big fat professional services fee for deployment assistance, the list goes on. The kicker is every user added increases the cost of all of these add-ons, pertinent to that user or not. I have also spoken to Nasuni and it's less than half the cost of Egnyte at the moment (though with fewer features via these add-ons and VPN is required for remote users, which sucks).
I want to present this to our partnership feeling confident it is worth the money (and it still might be), but with 200 users it's already really expensive and will just get exponentially more expensive as we grow. It's such a great fit for us too.
The_C3rb@reddit
Looked at it to but in the end went with Box. Works for 300 users globally in AEC field with 30TB of data. Only caveat is for us is that Revit Models stay in the Autodesk Cloud but otherwise been working fine for a year so far and no need for any VPN's for anyone.
_SleezyPMartini_@reddit
Also in the AEC sector. Very large models on ACC haven’t been an issue yet providing proper model planning and segmentation are taken into account. Are you sure you need this solution ?
TerminallyOdd@reddit (OP)
Our data consists of a lot more than what ACC covers, and Egnyte checks a lot of boxes for us - improves collaboration across global offices, VPN-less remote access is pretty big given our amount of remote/satellite office work, our backup and DR plans are improved with ASR. Plus, I'm juggling things solo on the IT side (that's another story) and I think this would require less maintenance on my part than current/other solutions. There are plenty of benefits, but again, super expensive.
_SleezyPMartini_@reddit
have you looked at using Autodesk docs?
HDClown@reddit
No first-hand experience with it, but I see LucidLink is another recommendation for people dealing with large files in AEC sector.
yParticle@reddit
Interesting timing, just had a local dentist office ask me about migrating their data from Egnyte to Sharepoint/OneDrive. Should I be concerned about regulatory issues or other features they may not be aware of in said conversion? From the looks of it they're just using it as overpriced cloud storage, and they're already paying for 365 licenses so that part made sense.
jazzdrums1979@reddit
You can run Egnyte Secure and govern (the compliance piece) on SharePoint.
DevinSysAdmin@reddit
HIPAA
Baller_Harry_Haller@reddit
We just did our Egnyte cutover this month. Also AEC although also some service components.
I loved our sales team- they did an excellent job. Professional services experience was average at best but I would definitely recommend, especially if a 1 man shop. Documentation for things like Desktop App is not great and was a communicated frustration. We actually used docs from another vendor to help us deploy.
I have been told that they are internally discussing some adjustments to licensing but that’s in context of the Pro vs STD licenses. It is pricey. And the “all or nothing” for licensing is frustrating.
Ultimately, there were a series of reasons for us to make the move. We wanted to shrink our virtual environment and this is part of that plan, VPN free was a huge selling point to execs, file availability thru an app was HUGE (and getting rid of SharePoint was actually the trigger for reviewing Egnyte).
As others have said- you can get those costs way down if you grind on sales. I believe they are in the process of going public and are eager to bring new business on.
derango@reddit
Yeah, the nickel and dime show kinda turned me off Egnyte when I was demoing their stuff. Particularly storage fees. Box was more attractive from a practical standpoint, but man did I like the Egnyte platform.
Fatel28@reddit
Egnyte is fuckin awesome. But it's damn near impossible to justify unless you have some strict compliance requirements backing you up. But man it's infinitely better than SharePoint and OneDrive. We have a customer with 17tb in their drive and it doesn't break a sweat
Zergfest@reddit
We run Egnyte. Roughly 100tb of data before dedupe, 400 staff. AEC as well.
Grind your rep for price breaks. On the enterprise tier, I saw over 50% off sticker price at our size.
We don’t use the specialized file handler, but we are looking at it very closely as it develops.
Georgiewho@reddit
Damn how large is your model that it can't be on BIM. We've had some multi tower projects on there. We looked into Egnyte and ultimately kept local servers. It's been difficult going full cloud with architects.
TerminallyOdd@reddit (OP)
It's not the size, but compliance requirements for certain projects and certain models older than three previous version of Revit are stored locally.