AWS Storage Gateway Overview

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage that provides seamless and secure integration with local on-premises IT infrastructure, and optimized data transfer.

Customers can use it in remote offices and datacenters for hybrid cloud workloads such as migration, storage tiering etc.

The Storage Gateway virtual appliance can connect to your local infrastructure as a file server, or as a local disk volume etc.

The Storage Gateway virtual appliance can be downloaded as a VM image of type either VMWare ESXi or Microsoft Hyper V, which can be then installed and associated with your AWS account through activation process. Once associated, we can use the management console to create the right storage gateway option.

Gateway types

1. File Gateway

   • Files are stored as objects in S3 buckets and accessed through a NFS mount point.

   • Ownerships, permissions and timestamps are stored in the S3 object’s user-metadata.

   • Once objects are transferred to S3, they can be managed as native S3 objects and bucket policies can be configured.

2. Volume Gateway

   • The volume interface provides disk blocks to applications using the iSCSI block protocol.

   • Data written to these volumes can be asynchronously backed up and stored in the cloud as EBS snapshots.

     • Snapshots are incremental backups capturing only changed blocks.

     • Snapshot storage is also compressed, thus reducing storage charges.

   • Two types:

     • Stored Volumes

       • Stores data locally, but asynchronously backs up to Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon EBS.

       • Provides low-latency access, but with good durability.

       • 1GB to 16GB in size.

     • Cached Volumes

       • Uses S3 as primary storage, but caches frequently used data locally.

       • Local servers attach to them as iSCSI devices.

       • Minimizes the need to scale local storage infrastructure.

       • Upto 32 TiB in size.

3. Tape Gateway

   • Durable, cost-effective solution to backup data into cloud.

   • Provides the VTL interface that lets you make use of existing tape based backup application infrastructure to store data on virtual tape catridges, which are then sent to S3.

   • Each Tape Gateway is preconfigured with a media changer and tape drives and will be available to existing client backup applications as iSCSI devices.

   • Supported by NetBackup, Backup Exec, Veam etc.