AWS Storage Gateway is software or hardware that can be installed in an on-prem data center to provide the ability to integrate local SAN, NAS, DAS with AWS S3 or Glacier.
¶ Usages
- disaster recovery
- backup & restore
- tiered storage (fast onprem, archived in aws)
- on-prmeises cache & low-latency files access
¶ Gateway Types
- S3 File Gateway
- FSx File Gateway
- Volume Gatewa
- Tape Gateway
¶ (S3) File Gateway
- Allows you to store files as objects in S3
- Ability to mount or map drives to and S3 bucket as it if wsa a shared held locally.
- Local on-prem cache is created for recent-frequently access objects.
- Filesystem is mounted on local devices
- Can use S3 lifecycle policies to move data to Glacier (as you can't write directly to Glacier)
- Buckets are accessed using IAM Roles
- SMB protocol has integration with AD for user auth.
¶ FSx File Gateway
- Native access to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
- Local Cache for frequently accessed file.
- Windows native capabilitiy (SMB, NTFS, AD).
- Useful for group file shares and home directories
¶ Volume Gateways
- Block storage using iSCSI
- Backed by EBS Snapshots wich can help restore on-prem volumes!
- Cached volumes: low latency access to most recent data
- Stored volumes: entire dataset is on prem, scheduled backups to S3
¶ Chached Volume Gateways
- Primary storage is on AWS
- Local storage is used as a cache for recent/frequently accessed objects to provide low latency access.
- Each Volume can be up to 32TiB
- Can support 32 volumes
- Total Storage is 1024TiB/Cached Volume Gateway
¶ Stored Volume gateways
- Mounted as iSCSI devics and backed by AWS S3 buckets
- Used to backup Volumes as EBS Snapshots
- Primary storage is local for low latency access.
- Volumes can be between 1-16GiB
- Each Storage Gateway can hold 32 Volumes.
- Max Storage of 512TiB
- A Storage buffer using on-prem storage is used as a stragitic port for data
- Data is uploaded across an SSL Channel and stored in an encrypted form
- (Incremental) Snapshots can be taken of volumes at any point and stored as EBS snapshots on S3.
¶ Pricing
- Volume Gateways create EBS Snapshots and are billed as such.
- Cached Volumes are charged on a per GB-Month metric of data stored
- Requests are billed similarly to file gateways - per GB of data written
- Max of $125/month/gateway.
- 1st 100GB is free, as well as deletes of EBS volumes or snapshots.
¶ Tape Gateway (VTL)
- Cloud based tape library
- Virtual Tapes, backed by S3 objects. (Each object is a virtual tape)
- Uses Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive
¶ Components
¶ Storage Gateway
The gateway itself is configured as a tape gateway which as a capacity to hold 1500 virtual tapes.
¶ Virtual Tapes
These are a virtual equivalent to a physical backup tape cartridge which can by anything from 100 gig to two and a half terabytes in size. And any data stored on the virtual tapes are backed by AWS S3 and appear in the virtual tape library.
¶ Virtual Tape Library. VTL
As you may have guessed these are virtual equivalents to a tape library that contain your virtual tapes.
¶ Tape Drives
Every VTL comes with ten virtual tape drives which are presented to your backup applications is iSCSI devices.
¶ Media Changer
This is a virtual device that manages tapes to and from the tape drive to your VTL and again it's presented as an iSCSI device to your backup applications.
¶ Archive
This is equivalent to an off-site tape backup storage facility where you can archive tapes from your virtual tape library to Amazon Glacier which as we already know, is used as a cold storage solution. If retrieval of the tapes are required, storage gateway uses the standard retrieval option which can take between 3 - 5 hours to retrieve your data.