Integrate Your On-Premises Data Center Using AWS Storage Gateway
As more organizations take a hybrid cloud approach with a mix of both on-premises resources and some public cloud resources, it is becoming increasingly important to seamlessly bridge the two environments together. Whether organizations want to move their backups to the cloud or want to shift their on-premises storage to cloud-backed file shares or want low latency access to data in AWS for on-premises applications, AWS Storage Gateway helps organizations connect their on-premises infrastructure with AWS. AWS Storage Gateway has several types of appliances to cover differing use-cases. Let’s dive into the service, the types of gateways and see what the benefits of each are.
What is Amazon Storage Gateway?
AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid storage service that gives organizations the ability to integrate Amazon’s reliable, secure and infinite cloud-based storage with their on-premises applications and workloads. Organizations are able to take advantage of the AWS cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage by using standard storage protocols like iSCSI, SMB and NFS to connect to the service using a virtual machine or hardware appliance. AWS Storage Gateway is also very secure and efficient. It uploads data using SSL, provides data encryption at rest in S3 using the AES-256 standard and performs compression of data in-transit and at-rest to reduce the amount of space occupied. AWS Storage Gateway comes in three types, the File Gateway, Tape Gateway, and Volume Gateway.
File Gateway
The File Gateway provides your on-premises workloads with a file interface to store files as objects in Amazon S3 and provides access to these objects using standard protocols like NFS and SMB. There are many use cases that this supports, including (a) migrating on-premise file data to Amazon S3 to take advantage of low-cost archival while maintaining access from your on-premise data center and (b) taking advantage of other AWS services in machine learning or big data analytics, to process the data that has been created by on-premise workloads. By using the file gateway, your organization can take advantage of Amazon S3’s secure and durable storage and provide your local data center with low-latency access.
Volume Gateway
The Volume Gateway enables you to present cloud-backed storage volumes to your on-premises workloads that can be mounted as iSCSI devices. Similar to the file gateway, there are many use cases for this service, so you can run volume gateway in two modes: (a) Gateway-Cached mode and (b) Gateway-Stored mode. In the cached mode, your data is stored in Amazon S3, while your frequently accessed data is stored in a local cache for low-latency access. In the stored mode, your data is stored locally and your entire volume is available locally while also being asynchronously backed up to AWS. Both modes enable you to take advantage of Amazon EBS snapshots and support data protection, recovery, migration, and other data needs.
Tape Gateway
Tape Gateway is a cloud-based virtual tape library that you can use to replace your physical tapes with virtual tapes stored in AWS. Tape Gateway takes advantage of Amazon S3’s low-cost cold storage tiers, S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive to store archived virtual tapes. The tape gateway presents a virtual tape library interface with media changers and tape drives and you can create virtual tapes from the AWS console. The service scales seamlessly and eliminates the burden of maintaining and scaling your own physical tape resources or hiring a tape management company.
Can Your Organization Benefit from AWS Storage Gateway?
Any organizations that have on-premise resources and would like to take advantage of Amazon S3’s performance, scalability and durability can benefit from AWS Storage Gateway. Whether you wish to move backups to the cloud, shift on-premises storage to cloud-backed files shares or access data in AWS from your on-premises applications with low-latency, there is an abundance of use-cases that AWS Storage Gateway solves.