Storage Gateway

Hybrid Cloud for Storage

• Hybrid cloud:
  • Part of a company’s infrastructure is in the public cloud (like AWS)
  • Part of a company’s infrastructure is on-premise
• S3 is a proprietary storage technology (unlike EFS/NFS), it can be exposed to on-premise servers through a storage gateway

Storage Gateway Introduction

• Bridge between on-premise data and cloud data in S3
• Uses cases for storage gateway with S3: disaster recovery, backup and restore, tiered storage
• AWS provides 3 types of storage gateways:
  • File Gateway: allows us to view files from the local files system, but this files are backed by S3
  • Volume Gateway: same as file gateway but with volumes
  • Tape Gateway: used for backup and recovery

File Gateway

• Configured S3 buckets are accessible using NFS and SMB protocols
• Supports S3 Standard, S3 IA, One Zone IA
• Each buckets will have its own IAM roles in order to be accessed by the file gateway
• Most recently used data is cached in the file gateway
• File Gateway can be mounted on many servers (because of the NFS protocol)

Volume Gateway

• Block storage using iSCSI protocol backed by S3
• EBS snapshots are created time to time which are stored in S3, these will help use to restore un-premise volumes
• Cached volumes: low latency access to the most recently used data
• Stored volumes: entire dataset is on premise, scheduled buckets are stored in S3
• Volumes are usually mounter using iSCSI protocol, for on-premise it will look like a local volume

Tape Gateway

• Some companies have backup processes using physical tapes
• With tape gateway these companies can use the same process, but the data will backed into the cloud
• Virtual Tape Library (VTL) backed by Amazon S3 and Glacier
• Backup processes using iSCSI interface will work as well with tape gateway

File Gateway - Hardware Appliance

• Using file gateway means we need virtualization, otherwise we can use a File Gateway Hardware Appliance
• It is an actual hardware which can be bought from amazon.com
• Helpful for daily NFS backup in small data centers

Storage Gateway Summary

• File access / NFS => File Gateway (backed by S3)
• Volumes / Block Storage / iSCSI => Volume Gateway (backed by S3 with EBS snapshots)
• VTL Tape solution / Backup with iSCSI => Tape Gateway (backed by S3 and Glacier)