AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that enables extended storage capability to your on-premises, and thus seamlessly extending storage capacity (to cloud) and be virtually unlimited.
Key Points for AWS Storage Gateway
- Gateway extends your on-premise storage services to S3, S3 Glacier, S3 Glacier Deep Archive, EBS, AWS Backup, etc.
- Storage has a highly-optimized and efficient data transfer mechanism, with bandwidth management and automated network resilience
- You can leverage AWS services like CloudWatch, CloudTrail, IAM, KMS, etc., for monitoring, management and security.
- Storage Gateway can be made available as a virtual machine (VM) or as a physical hardware applicance
- Host Platform (for Gateway) can run on: VMWare ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V , Linux KVM, Amazon EC2, Hardware Appliance
- Storage Gateways support these protocols – NFS, SMB, iSCSI, iSCSI-VTL
- Cache – Gateways maintain cache (at on-premise) to enable low-latency access for your applications to data stored in AWS
- Local cache can be up to 64 TB
- Security – Gateways support end to end security of data between on-premise and AWS Cloud
- Storage Gateway supports compliance for HIPAA, PCI, FIPS 140-2
- Use Cases: backups in the (AWS) cloud, using on-premises file shares backed by cloud storage, low latency access to data in AWS for on-premise applications
Types of Storage Gateways
- File Gateway
- Tape Gateway
- Volume Gateway
- Cache Mode
- Stored Mode
File Gateway
- Store files as objects in Amazon S3, with a local cache for low-latency access to most recently used data
- Protocols used – NFS and SMB
- File Gateway publishes audit logs for SMB file share user operations to CloudWatch
- Often used to migrate on-premise file data to S3
- How File Gateway works:
Image courtesy of AWS
Tape Gateway
- Enables a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) consisting of virtual tape drives and a virtual media changer
- Back up your data to Amazon S3 and archive in Amazon Glacier using your existing tape-based processes
- Protocol used – iSCSI
- Tape Gateway stores your virtual tapes in service-managed S3 buckets, and creates new virtual tapes automatically, thus simplifying management.
- Tape Gateway supports key Backup Software like: Arcserve Backup, Bacula, Commvault, Dell EMC NetWorker, IBM Spectrum Protect, Micro Focus Data Protector, Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, NovaStor DataCenter, Quest NetVault Backup, Veeam Backup & Replication, Veritas Backup Exec, Veritas NetBackup
- How Tape Gateway works:
Image courtesy of AWS
Volume Gateway
- Enables Block storage volumes for your applications, which provides asynchronous backups via point-in-time EBS snapshots
- Often used for DR based on EBS Snapshots, or Cached Volume Clones
- Offered in two modes:
- Cached Mode
- Stored Mode
Volume Cached Mode – primary data is stored in S3, and frequently accessed data is kept locally in cache
Image courtesy of AWS
Volume Stored Mode – primary data is stored locally and asynchronously backed up to AWS
Image courtesy of AWS
Pricing
AWS Storage Gateway is billed for following components:
File Gateway
- Storage – billed per S3 pricing
- Requests
- Data written to AWS Storage by Gateway – per GB
- File storage in S3 – billed per S3 requests pricing
- Data Transfer (Out) – per GB
Volume Gateway
- Storage
- Volume storage – per GB per month
- Snapshots storage – billed per EBS Snapshots pricing
- Requests
- Data written to AWS Storage by Gateway – per GB
- EBS Snapshot / Volume Deletes – free
- Data Transfer (Out) – per GB
Tape Gateway
- Storage
- Virtual tape storage – per GB per month
- Virtual tape storage (archived in S3 Glacier) – per GB per month
- Virtual tape storage (archived in S3 Glacier Deep Archive) – per GB per month
- Requests
- Data written to AWS Storage by Gateway – per GB
- Virtual tape retrieval – per GB
- Price varies by underlying storage type – Glacier / Glacier Deep Archive
- Virtual tape archival – free
- Data Transfer (Out) – per GB
Hardware Appliances – by each Appliance
External Resources
