3.9 Storage Gateway
Terms
On-premises software: it is installed and runs on computers on the premises of the person or organization using the software, rather than at a remote facility such as a server farm or cloud.
Off-premises software: it is commonly called “software as a service” ("SaaS") or “cloud computing”.
Volumes: it is the concept of the "volumes" in your windows OS computer, such as (E:), (C:), (D:).
Overview
AWS Storage Gateway is a service that connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization's on-promises IT environment and AWS's storage infrastructure. The service enables you to securely store data to the AWS cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage.
AWS Storage Gateways's software appliance is available for download as a virtual machine image that you install on a host in your datacenter. Storage Gateway supports either VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V. Once you have installed your gateway and associated it with your AWS account through the activation process, you can use the AWS Management Console to create the storage gateway option that is right for you.
Structure
[Your Data Center (running a Storage Gateway)] ======> [propagate asynchronous replicate of your data up to] ======> [AWS's storage services (S3 or Glacier)]
Four Types of Storage Gateways
#1. File Gateway (NFS)
It is for flat files and for object-based storage, it allows you to store files/objects up to S3.
#2. Volumes Gateway (iSCSI)
It is for object-based storage and block-based storage, such as storing flat files or a database or operating system and back them up to EBS in the form of snapshots. Snapshot is a kind of file/object, so it will be finally stored S3 (S3 is object-based, EBS is block-based storage). Two types of Volumes Gateway:
Stored Volumes: this is for store a entire copy of your data set from on-premise to AWS asynchronously.
Cached Volumes: only store most recently data on-premise, such as access data, and the rest of data is backed off into AWS.
#3. Tape Gateway (VTL)
This is a back up or archive solution. It allows you to create virtual tapes and then send them to S3, and then you can use life-cycle policies to send those virtual tapes off to Glacier.
In details
#1. File Gateway
#2. Volume Gateway
The volume interface presents your applications with disk volumes (i.e. virtual hard disks) using the iSCSI block protocol.
Data written to these volumes can be asynchronously backed up as point-in-time snapshots of your volumes, and stored in the cloud as Amazon EBS snapshots. (Amazon Elastic Block Store is a virtual hard disk that we are going to attach to our EC2 instances which are virtual machines. EBS is just virtual hard disk attached with EC2, so we do not consider it as yet another storage service.)
Snapshots are incremental backups that capture only changed blocks. All snapshot storage is also compressed to minimize your storage charges.
There are two kinds of Volume Gateway, but I just want you to imagine it as virtual hard disks that sit there, on-premise, and then back them up to AWS S3:
#3. Tape Gateway
Exam Tips
File Gateway: for flat files only (text, image, video), stored directly on S3.
Volume Gateway: Stored Volumes - Enable dataset is stored on site and is asynchronously backed up to S3. Cached Volume - Entire dataset is stored on S3 and the most frequently accessed data is cached on site.
Tape Gateway (Gateway Virtual Tape Library, VTL): used for backup and uses popular backup applications like NetBackup, Backup Exec, Veeam etc.
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