Storage Gateway

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)