Explain different types of storage gateways

This recipe explains what different types of storage gateways

AWS Storage Gateway

Storage Gateway is an on-premise hybrid cloud storage solution that enables your applications to use AWS cloud storage services such as S3, Glacier, EBS, and others. It is deployed as a virtual machine or a hardware gateway appliance, and it provides very optimized data transfer capabilities, as well as a variety of other features, by utilizing storage protocols such as NFS, iSCSI, and SMB

When it comes to using Storage Gateway, there are numerous advantages. It provides very low latency network and disc performance due to its local caching, and it also supports encryption, data protection, and bandwidth management.

Storage Gateway is natively integrated with many other AWS services, allowing your data to be used by analytics, machine learning, logging, monitoring, and other products. Your data will benefit from all of the cloud services that it uses, including security, scalability, availability, and durability (Amazon S3 and Glacier are designed for 99.999999999% durability).

Using Storage Gateway reduces the cost of maintaining your on-premise storage solution, which has a significant impact on your business overall. By eliminating the large upfront cost of hardware and shifting to an operational expenses model, your business can become more flexible and rely on the global infrastructure and products provided by AWS with greater ease.

AWS Gateway Storage Types

AWS Storage Gateway is available in three flavours: File Gateway, Volume Gateway, and Tape Gateway, each tailored to specific needs and requirements.

    • GATEWAY TO FILE

A File Gateway is a type of Storage Gateway that allows you to connect your existing on-premises application to Amazon S3. It enables NFS (Network File System) and SMB (Server Message Block) access to data in S3 for any workload that requires object manipulation.By relying on AWS S3, File Gateway provides you with not only a variety of S3 storage classes to choose from, but also the ability to implement various policies on your data and even replicate it across the globe within other available regions.

    • Use Cases

File Gateway is an excellent choice for a variety of hybrid cloud workloads. For example, if your company performs a lot of big data analytics but uses both on-premise and AWS cloud infrastructure, File Gateway makes it simple to move data to S3 and ingest it into something like EMR or Athena.

The resulting data can also be stored in S3, making it visible to your on-premise applications—something that can be used for business intelligence and other purposes.

Another application for this service is machine learning, especially if you use AWS services like SageMaker, Forecast, or Rekognition.

Because of the NFS and SMB interfaces, File Gateway can also be used for simple cloud backups. Your existing backup jobs can begin directly offloading data to S3, and retention policies can be used to transition the data to different storage classes to reduce costs.

    • GATEWAY TO VOLUME

Volume Gateways, as opposed to File Gateways, are used to present your on-premise application with iSCSI block storage. Volume Gateways provide point-in-time backups of your volumes as EBS snapshots and are available in two operational modes: stored and cached.

Stored volumes allow you to access your entire data set locally on the gateway while keeping an asynchronous copy in the S3 bucket.

Cached volumes save the entire volume to S3 while only keeping the most recently used data in local cache.

    • Use Cases

Volume Gateways are frequently used for local data backup and disaster recovery. You can easily recreate an EBS volume and attach it to a running EC2 instance if you have a snapshot of your data on AWS, allowing you to quickly recover from an event that affected your on-premise data centre. Volume Gateways are also integrated with the AWS Backup service, making backup management easier.

Volume Gateways are also an excellent choice for migrating application data to the cloud. You can quickly move your on-premise data to EBS volumes and run it in the cloud thanks to snapshots.

    • TAPE GATEWAY

Tape Gateway functions as an iSCSI-based Virtual Tape Library (VTL). It consists of a virtual media changer and virtual tape drives that are deployed on-premises and allow you to continue to rely on your existing backup workflows. At the same time, your data is written to virtual tapes that are stored in long-lasting S3 buckets and is ready to be archived to Glacier (lowering storage costs even further) when frequent access is no longer required.

Tape Gateway is compatible with a wide range of popular backup applications, including Dell EMC NetWorker, Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, and many more.

    • Use Cases

Tape Gateways are primarily used to replace old tape backup systems without requiring significant changes to your current backup process. Physical tape backup systems required expensive hardware, and the tape management process was problematic. Shipping tapes to off-site storage took time and money, and it also rendered your offline data inaccessible. Durability was also a concern, which changes dramatically when using S3 and Glacier.

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