AWS Storage Gateway

What is the Storage Gateway Service?

Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage solution that gives applications hosted on-prem access to virtually unlimited storage in the cloud. You can use Storage Gateway in one of three different configurations; File, Volume and Tape Gateways.

File Gateway: Virtual On-Prem File Server

• Store and retrieve files as objects in S3.
• Use with On-Prem apps and EC2 apps that need S3 File Storage.
• Offers SMB or NFS access to data in S3 with local caching.
• Can be integrated with S3 Tiering System to save costs on storage.
• File based applications work without change.

Volume Gateway: Cached vs Stored

• Supports iSCI protocol.
• SAN-Like with Cloud Recovery (S3 > AWS Backup > Snapshots > Recovery).

Cached:

• Stores the most accessed/used data on premises in low-latency cache.
• All other objects/files are stored in S3.
• Can use AWS Backup to take snapshots of data stored in S3 and store in EBS Volumes.

Stored:

• Entire data set is stored on-premises.
• Point-in-time snapshots of data sent to S3  for backup.
• The snapshots are asynchronous and compressed.
• Can use AWS Backup to take snapshots of data stored in S3 and store in EBS Volumes.

Tape Gateway:

• Used for backup with popular backup software such as Vaeem.
• Up to 1500 tapes with aggregate capacity of 1PB.
• All transfers are encrypted.
• Encryption at rest with SSE-S3.