What is Volume Gateway?

AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless integration with data security features between your on-premises IT environment and the AWS storage infrastructure. You can use the service to store data in the Amazon Web Services Cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage that helps maintain data security.

AWS Storage Gateway offers file-based File Gateways (Amazon S3 File and Amazon FSx File), volume-based (Cached and Stored), and tape-based storage solutions.

Topics

• Volume Gateway
• Are you a first-time Storage Gateway user?
• How Volume Gateway works (architecture)
• Storage Gateway pricing
• Plan your Storage Gateway deployment

Volume Gateway

Volume Gateway – A Volume Gateway provides cloud-backed storage volumes that you can mount as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) devices from your on-premises application servers.

You can deploy a Volume Gateway either on-premises as a VM appliance running on VMware ESXi, KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, as a hardware appliance, or in AWS as an Amazon EC2 instance.

The gateway supports the following volume configurations:

• Cached volumes – You store your data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and retain a copy of frequently accessed data subsets locally. Cached volumes offer a substantial cost savings on primary storage and minimize the need to scale your storage on-premises. You also retain low-latency access to your frequently accessed data.

• Stored volumes – If you need low-latency access to your entire dataset, first configure your on-premises gateway to store all your data locally. Then asynchronously back up point-in-time snapshots of this data to Amazon S3. This configuration provides durable and inexpensive offsite backups that you can recover to your local data center or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For example, if you need replacement capacity for disaster recovery, you can recover the backups to Amazon EC2.

Documentation: For Volume Gateway documentation, see Creating a Volume Gateway.

Are you a first-time Storage Gateway user?

In the following documentation, you can find a Getting Started section that covers setup information common to all gateways and also gateway-specific setup sections. The Getting Started section shows you how to deploy, activate, and configure storage for a gateway. The management section shows you how to manage your gateway and resources:

• Creating a Volume Gateway describes how to create and use a Volume Gateway. It shows you how to create storage volumes and back up data to the volumes.

• Managing Your Gateway describes how to perform management tasks for your gateway and its resources.

In this guide, you can primarily find how to work with gateway operations by using the AWS Management Console. If you want to perform these operations programmatically, see the AWS Storage Gateway API Reference.

Storage Gateway pricing

For current information about pricing, see Pricing on the AWS Storage Gateway details page.

Plan your Storage Gateway deployment

By using the Storage Gateway software appliance, you can connect your existing on-premises application infrastructure with scalable, cost-effective AWS cloud storage that provides data security features.

To deploy Storage Gateway, you first need to decide on the following two things:

1. Your gateway type – this guide covers the following gateway type:

   • Volume Gateway – Using Volume Gateways, you can create storage volumes in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Your on-premises applications can access these as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) targets. There are two options—cached and stored volumes.

     • With cached volumes, you store volume data in AWS, with a small portion of recently accessed data in the cache on-premises. This approach allows low-latency access to your frequently accessed dataset. It also provides seamless access to your entire dataset stored in AWS. By using cached volumes, you can scale your storage resource without having to provision additional hardware.

     • With stored volumes, you store the entire set of volume data on-premises and store periodic point-in-time backups (snapshots) in AWS. In this model, your on-premises storage is primary, delivering low-latency access to your entire dataset. AWS storage is the backup that you can restore in the event of a disaster in your data center.

     For both cached and stored volumes, you can take point-in-time snapshots of your Volume Gateway volumes in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots. You can use a snapshot of your volume as the starting point for a new Amazon EBS volume, which you can then attach to an Amazon EC2 instance. Using this approach, you can supply data from your on-premises applications to your applications running on Amazon EC2 if you require additional on-demand compute capacity for data processing or replacement capacity for disaster recovery purposes. This allows you to make space-efficient versioned copies of your volumes for data protection, recovery, migration and various other data transfer needs.

     For information on creating a volume based on an Amazon EBS snapshot, see Creating a volume.

     For an architectural overview of Volume Gateways, see Cached volumes architecture and Stored volumes architecture>.

2. Hosting option – You can run Storage Gateway either on-premises as a VM appliance or hardware appliance, or in AWS as an Amazon EC2 instance. For more information, see Requirements. If your data center goes offline and you don't have an available host, you can deploy a gateway on an EC2 instance. Storage Gateway provides an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that contains the gateway VM image.

Additionally, as you configure a host to deploy a gateway software appliance, you need to allocate sufficient storage for the gateway VM.

Before you continue to the next step, make sure that you have done the following:

• For a gateway deployed on-premises, choose the type of VM host and set it up. Your options are VMware ESXi Hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). If you deploy the gateway behind a firewall, make sure that ports are accessible to the gateway VM. For more information, see Requirements.