What is AWS Storage Gateway?

AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage such as AWS S3 or Glacier to provide seamless integration with data security features between your on-premises IT environment and the AWS storage infrastructure.

• the storage gateway itself is a software appliance that can be installed within your own data center
• The appliance can be downloaded as a virtual machine

File Gateways

• Allow you to securely store your file as an object within S3, presented as an NFS share which the client can mount or map a drive to
• All data is sent over an HTTPS connection
• All Objects are automatically encrypted using SSE-S3(Serverside Encryption with S3 managed keys)
• A Local cache is provisioned using on-premise storage to access the most recent accessed files to optimized latency

Volume Gateways

Stored Volume Gateways

• Used to backup your on-premise local storage volumes to Amazon S3
• Your entire data library is also kept on-premise for minimal latency
• Stored volumes are backed by Amazon S3 and are mapped directly to on-premise-storage
• Presented as iSCSI devices allowing communication from your application server
• As data is written to these volumes, it is first stored using the on-premise mapped storage, before Storage Gateway then copies the same data asynchronously to S3
• Snapshot of volumes can be taken and stored on S3 as EBS snapshots
• Volumes size can be 1 Gib — 16 Tib and hold up to 32 volumes giving total storage of 512 TiB
• Data is stored in an on-premise buffer before being written to S3 using an SSL connection
• In a disaster, the EBS snapshots can be used to create new EBS volumes and attached to the EC2 instance

Cached Volume Gateways

• The primary data storage is on S3 rather than on your own on-premise storage solution
• A cache is held locally using on-premise storage for buffering, aiding latency
• Presented as iSCSI devices allowing connectivity from your application servers
• All data sent to S3 uses an SSL connection and is encrypted using SSE-S3
• Volumes can be 32 TiB in size with a total of 32 volumes, giving total storage of 1024 TiB
• Snapshots of these volumes can also be taken and stored on S3 as EBS Snapshots
• In a disaster, the EBS snapshots could be used to create new EBS volumes which can be attached to EC2 instances

Tape Gateways

• Tape Gateways are known as Virtual Tape Libraries(VTL)
• Allows you to backup data to S3, but also leverage Amazon Glacier for data archiving
• A Virtual Tape Library is essentially a Cloud-based tape backup solution
• Tape Gateways contain the following elements: Virtual Tapes, Virtual Tape Library, Tape Drivers, Media Changer, Archives
• Applications and backup software can mouth the tape drives along with the Media Changer as iSCSI devices
• Virtual tapes are created as you need them
• When virtual tapes are archived, the data is moved from Amazon S3 to Amazon Glacier

Nadtakan Futhoem — Sr. Software Engineer