What Is AWS Storage Gateway?

Gateway-Cached Volume Solution—In this storage architecture, you create your storage volumes and mount them as iSCSI devices from your on-premises application servers. The gateway stores data you write to your gateway-cached volume in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and stores only a cache of frequently accessed data on your on-premises storage hardware. Storing your volume data in Amazon S3 minimizes the need for you to scale your on-premises storage infrastructure, since Amazon S3 scales on demand.

Gateway-Stored Volume Solution—In this storage architecture, you store all your data locally in storage volumes on your on-premises storage hardware. The gateway periodically takes snapshots as incremental backups and stores them in Amazon S3.

Corporate File Sharing – Managing on-premises storage for departmental file shares and home directories typically results in high capital and maintenance costs, under-utilized hardware, and restrictive user quotas. AWS Storage Gateway addresses these on-premises scaling and maintenance issues by enabling you to seamlessly store your corporate file shares on Amazon S3, while keeping a copy of your frequently accessed files on-premises. This minimizes the need to scale your on-premises file storage infrastructure, while still providing low-latency access to your frequently accessed data.

Backup – Both the storage solutions AWS Storage Gateway offers enable your existing on-premises applications to store data backups off-site in Amazon S3. All data is securely transferred to AWS over SSL and stored encrypted in Amazon S3 using AES 256-bit encryption. AWS Storage Gateway provides an attractive alternative to the traditional choice of either maintaining costly hardware in multiple data centers, or dealing with the longer recovery times and operational burden of managing off-site tape storage.

Disaster Recovery and Resilience – AWS Storage Gateway addresses the data replication challenges of disaster recovery (DR) by enabling you to create Gateway-Stored volumes that maintain your primary data on-premises, while storing point-in-time backup snapshots of this data in Amazon S3 as Amazon EBS snapshots. Amazon S3 redundantly stores these snapshots in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility, quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), you can configure virtual machine images of your DR application servers in AWS, and pay for these servers only when you need them. If your on-premises infrastructure goes down, you simply launch the Amazon EC2 compute instances that you need, restore your snapshots to new Amazon EBS volumes, attach the volumes to your running Amazon EC2 instances, and your DR environment is up and running.

Data Mirroring to Cloud-Based Compute Resources – If you want to leverage Amazon EC2's on-demand compute capacity for additional capacity during peak periods, whether for new projects or as a more cost-effective way to run your normal workloads, you can use AWS Storage Gateway to mirror your on-premises data to Amazon EC2 instances.

What is AWS Storage Gateway—The rest of this section provides service highlights, a deployment overview, and the requirements for deploying the AWS Storage Gateway virtual machine (VM).

Getting Started with AWS Storage Gateway—The Getting Started section provides you with instructions to set up an AWS Storage Gateway virtual machine (VM), activate it, and configure it so that you have a working gateway. You also test the setup in which you save sample data locally, take a backup snapshot that the gateway uploads to AWS, and restore the snapshot to your local storage volume, showing you how AWS Storage Gateway enables you to recover your data.

Setting Up AWS Storage Gateway – The Getting Started section provides the minimum required steps to set up and test a gateway. This section provides additional information, such as how to estimate the amount of working storage that your gateway requires. Additionally, if you follow the AWS Storage Gateway console wizard to set up your gateway, the wizard steps provide help links to the topics in this section.

Managing Your Activated Gateway – After you deploy and activate your gateway, this section provides you with information about how to manage your gateway. The ongoing management tasks include adding storage volumes and working storage, working with snapshots, general maintenance, troubleshooting, and monitoring your gateway.

When working with snapshots, you want to know the difference between default and ad-hoc snapshots, how to find information about a snapshot, and how to schedule a snapshot. For more information, see Working with Snapshots. This section also describes how to restore a snapshot locally to a new AWS Storage Gateway volume, or use a snapshot to create an Amazon EBS volume and attach it to an Amazon EC2 instance. For more information, see Restoring a Snapshot.

You can monitor your gateway using Amazon CloudWatch metrics. AWS Storage Gateway displays key operational metrics for your gateway, storage volumes, and working storage in the AWS Management Console. In Amazon CloudWatch, you can measure the performance between your application and your gateway and between the gateway and AWS. You can also view metrics for throughput, latency, and a number of input/output operations. For more information, see Monitoring Your AWS Storage Gateway.