What is Storage Gateway?
AWS Storage Gateway is a service that connects on-premises software appliances with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization’s IT on-premises environment and AWS Storage infrastructure. The service enables you to securly store data to the AWS cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage.
AWS Storage Gateway appliance is available for download as a virtual machine image that you install on a host in your datacenter. Storage Gateway supports either VM Ware ESXI or Microsoft Hyper-V. Once you’ve installed your gateway and associated it with your AWS account through the activation process, you can use the AWS management console to create the storage gateway option that is right for you.
Four Types of Storage Gateways
1.File Gateway (NFS)
: Files are stored as objects in your S3 buckets, accessed through a Network File System mount point. Ownership, permissions, and timestamps are durably stored in S3 in the user-metadata of the object associated with the file. Once objects are transferred to S3, they can be managed as native S3 objects, and bucket policies such as versioning, lifecycle managment, and cross-region replication apply directly to objects stored in your bucket.
2.Volumes Gateway(iSCSI)
: The volumn interface presents your applications with disk volumes using the iSCSI block protocol.
Data written to these volumes can be asynchronously backed up as point-in-time snapshots of your volumes, and stored in the cloud as Amazon EBS snapshots.
Snapshots are incremental backups that capture only changed blocks. All snapshot storage is also compressed to minimize your storage charges.
1)Stored Volumes
: Stored volumes let you store your primary data locally, while asynchronously backing up the data to AWS Stored volumes provide your on-premises applications with low-latency access to their entire datasets, while providing durable, off-site backups. You can create storage volumes and mount them as iSCSI dvices from your on-premises application servers. Data written to your stored volumes is stored on you on-premises storage hardware. This data is asynchronously backed up to Amazon Simple Storage Service in the form of Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots. 1GB to 16 TB in size for Stored Volumes.
2)Cached Volumes
: cached volumes let you use Amazon Simple Storage Service as your primary data storage while retaining frequently accessed data locally in your storage gateway. Cached volumes minimize the need to sacle your on-premises storage infrastructure, while still providing your applications with low-latency access to their frequently accessed data. You can create storage volumes up to 32 TiB in size and attach to them as iSCSI devices from your on-premises application servers. Your gateway stores data that you write to these volumes in Amazon S3 and retains recently read data in your on-premises storage gateway’s cache and upload buffer storage. 1GB to 32TB in size for Cached Volumes.
3.Tape Gateway(VTL)
: Tape Gateway offeres a durable, cost-effective solution to archive your data in the AWS Cloud. The VTL interface it provides lets you leverage your existing tape-based backup application infrastructure to store data on virtual tape cartridges that you create on your tape gateway. Each tape gateway is preconfigured with a media changer and tape drives, which are available to your existing client backup applications as iSCSI devices. You add tape cartridges as you need to archive your data. Supported by NetBackup, Backup Exec, Veeam etc.
Summary
File Gateway — for flat files, stored directly on S3
Volume Gateway:
- Stored Volumes: Entire Dataset is stored on site and is asynchoronously backed up to S3.
- Cached Volumes: Entire Dataset is sotred on S3 and the most frequently accessed data is cached on site.
Gateway Virtual Tape Library(VTL) — Used for backup and uses popular backkup applications like NetBackup, Backup Exec, Veeam etc.
