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The Amazon Storage Gateway is one of the most frequently used storage and backup services from AWS. The Amazon Storage Gateway fundamentally runs on a VM and connects with AWS’ storage and backup services (such as S3, Glacier, EBS and EFS), as well as local storage infrastructure, through a simple and extensible console. Essentially, it lets your on-premise (local) applications and data travel in and out of AWS Cloud smoothly, using NFS, SMB or iSCSI.

Organizations that are using AWS storage and backup products will find that the Amazon Storage Gateway is not just economical, but also greatly simplifies resource management, utilization, provisioning and security. To leverage the Amazon Storage Gateway effectively, users need to be familiar with the three architectural models that the gateway operates in:

  • Gateway-cached volume: This model involves using local machines (on-premise) to save transient, frequently accessed data, while large volume static data (primary data) is stored in Amazon S3. It also provides Snapshot capability to save point-in-time backups of the data saved in S3.
  • Gateway-stored volume: This model involves storing primary data locally, and only saving snapshots in Amazon S3. This is a very effective model for DR and off-site backup needs.
  • Gateway-virtual tape library: This allows you to store tape backups in the form of a Virtual Tape library on Amazon S3. You can further move data from the Virtual Tape Library to Amazon Glacier (Virtual Tape Shelf) when your data access is highly infrequent.
  • The Amazon Storage Gateway offers high levels of flexibility to organizations with varied backup and storage needs, through simple and easy-to-use interfaces, encrypted data, extremely low latency and auto-optimization capabilities for the highest levels of performance and availability. Cloud and managed service leaders like NTT have off-the-shelf solutions for Amazon Storage Gateway implementation and management, which means that new adopters will stand to benefit through implementation and managed service partnerships.