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Amazon Storage Gateway

Amazon Storage Gateway

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Overview

The Amazon Storage Gateway service seamlessly enables hybrid storage between on-premises storage environments and the Amazon Web Services Cloud. It combines a multi-protocol storage appliance with highly efficient network connectivity to Amazon cloud storage services, delivering local performance with virtually unlimited scale. Customers use it in remote offices and datacenters for hybrid cloud workloads, backup and restore, archive, disaster recovery, and tiered storage.

The Storage Gateway virtual appliance connects directly to your local infrastructure as a file server, as a volume, or as a virtual tape library (VTL). This seamless connection makes it simple for organizations to augment existing on-premises storage investments with the high scalability, extreme durability and low cost of cloud storage.

Benefits

Cloud-Integrated

Hybrid cloud storage means your data can be accessed on-premises and take advantage of the advanced capabilities in Amazon Cloud storage services, including Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier), Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier) Deep Archive, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, and Amazon EBS. Once data is moved to Amazon Web Services, you'll benefit from using Amazon Web Services compute, machine learning, and big data analytics services to gain more insights from your data. Additionally, you can leverage the full Amazon Web Services portfolio of security and management services including Amazon Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon CloudTrail.

Simple

It is simple to get started with Amazon Storage Gateway. You download the gateway virtual machine software from Amazon Web Services, assign an IP address to the gateway, and associate the gateway with your Amazon Web Services account by activating it. Your gateway is managed and updated from the Amazon Web Services console. Storage Gateway requires no changes to your applications, easily integrating with standard storage protocols on-premises.

Durable and Secure

Data stored through Amazon Storage Gateway benefits from the durability and security embedded in Amazon Web Services Cloud storage services. Storage Gateway high availability on VMware meets the operational needs of uninterruptible, latency-sensitive workloads such as media drives, streaming log repositories, and storage for scientific instruments. All data that Storage Gateway transfers to Amazon Web Services is encrypted in transit and at rest in Amazon Web Services.

Efficient Access

Amazon Storage Gateway caches data in the local VM, providing low-latency disk and network performance for your most active data. It manages local cache offloads to the cloud in the background based on your desired performance parameters. Users and applications continue to operate using a local storage model and seamlessly work with data in the cloud. Only data that changes is transferred to Amazon Web Services Cloud storage using compression and bandwidth management to optimize data transfers.

Scalable

Customers experience a fast deployment and the cloud storage is delivered and billed on demand, enabling your business to leverage the virtually infinite scale of the Amazon Web Services Cloud as business needs fluctuate. Workloads can expand and contract, backup and archive storage can extend without upfront costs, and you can provision additional storage capacity without new hardware. Storage Gateway gives customers looking for hybrid cloud storage the benefits of both worlds since it provides an easy on-ramp to the cloud while supporting your on-premises applications.

How It Works

Connect as a File Server

The file interface offers on-premises servers and applications access to Storage Gateway as a network file share. Data is cached for local performance. Once in Amazon S3, data is accessible as objects in S3 with Amazon S3 File Gateway or fully managed file shares in Amazon FSx File Gateway. Amazon S3 File Gateway is optimized for heavy ingest workloads such as backups and archives, as well as for SMB and NFS access of data lakes stored in S3. Amazon FSx File Gateway optimized for user home directories and departmental file shares using the SMB file protocol.

Connect as a Local Disk

The volume interface presents the Storage Gateway to on-premises servers and applications as a local disk. Data in these volumes can be transferred into Amazon S3 cloud storage and accessed through the Storage Gateway service. Store data locally for the highest performance (with snapshot backups to the cloud), or blend latency and scale by storing frequently-accessed data locally with "cooler" data in the cloud.

Connect as a Virtual Tape Library (VTL)

The tape interface replaces backup tapes and tape automation equipment with local disk and cloud storage. Your existing backup and recovery software writes native backup jobs to virtual tapes stored on the Storage Gateway. Virtual tapes can be migrated into Amazon S3 and eventually archived into Amazon Glacier for the lowest cost. Data is accessed through your backup application and the backup catalog maintains complete visibility for all backup jobs and tapes.

Transfer Data Into and Out of the Cloud

Storage Gateway automatically buffers on-premises data and efficiently moves it into (and out of) cloud storage services. This reduces the time and cost of moving data between your site and the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Optimizations such as multipart management, delta transfers, bandwidth throttling, and bandwidth scheduling are standard for all interfaces.

Use Cases

Storage Gateway enables you to securely and easily store backups in the cloud. These include database backups, file share backups, tape archives, and more. Tape Gateway provides a virtual tape library, with each virtual tape being stored in Amazon S3, and supports all major backup applications. Tape Gateway is designed to be a seamless drop-in replacement to your existing physical tape infrastructure. When you no longer require immediate or frequent access to data contained on a virtual tape, you can have your backup application archive it. Your data goes from the virtual tape library into Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier) or Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier) Deep Archive, further reducing storage costs.

For file-based backups and archives, Amazon S3 File Gateway offers you a seamless way to connect to the cloud in order to store application data files, access analytics and ML datasets, and backup data as objects on Amazon S3 cloud storage.

Amazon FSx File Gateway helps you access fully managed, cloud backed file shares from on-premises, reduces your costs of storing data locally, and provides you with additional flexibility by allowing you to access your data in the cloud. Nearly all enterprises, regardless of industry, have to store files, whether they are user file shares, media content, or application datasets. Managing and scaling on-premises infrastructure is often burdensome and costly, requiring expensive hardware refreshes, expansion, and software licensing. Amazon FSx File Gateway helps you reduce these on-premises costs and physical hardware footprints giving you more freedom to make the decisions for your business.

Storage Gateway enables on-premises applications to use cloud storage by providing low-latency data access over standard storage protocols. A local cache stores your most recently used data on-premises, and the cloud provides scalability as well as industry-leading data protection, durability, availability, security, and performance. Storage Gateway provides a simple first step into the cloud and is designed to be easy to deploy, easy to activate, and easy for your applications to access.

With a Volume Gateway configuration, you can take snapshots of your local volumes and store those snapshots in Amazon EBS. Those snapshots can be the starting point for an Amazon EBS volume, which you can then attach to an Amazon EC2 instance. In the event of a local site disaster, simply set up your applications in the cloud or in a different data center, and restore your snapshot to get back up and running.