AWS Storage Gateway
AWS Storage Gateway is a virtual device — installed as a hypervisor or VM at an on-premises data center — that integrates on-premises applications with Amazon Web Services storage, giving on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage.
Key points
- Offers secure, scalable, and cost-effective storage management.
- Amazon S3 File Gateway (formerly File Gateway):
- Supports S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and S3 Intelligent-Tiering as storage classes for file share objects (does not support S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval).
- Supports NFS and SMB protocols to store and retrieve files.
- Supports WORM (Write Once Read Many) based file systems.
- Can migrate an on-premises NFS workload to AWS.
- Amazon FSx File Gateway — a separate gateway type providing low-latency, on-premises access to fully managed Windows file shares in Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, distinct from S3 File Gateway.
- Tape Gateway:
- Uses Amazon S3 Glacier to archive backup data.
- Stores data on virtual tape cartridges using a VTL (virtual tape library) interface over an iSCSI connection.
- Supports WORM based file systems.
- Can be used to extend an on-premises physical tape library’s capacity; a virtual tape ranges from 100 GiB to 15 TiB, with up to 1,500 tapes and 1 PiB total per gateway (no limit once tapes are archived).
- Volume Gateway — uses block storage (Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes) as a storage interface over the iSCSI block protocol:
- Stored Volumes — stores the entire dataset locally, offering low-latency access to all data and backups; supports up to 32 volumes per gateway, each up to 16 TiB, totaling up to 512 TiB per gateway.
- Cached Volumes — stores the most recently used data locally and the rest in Amazon S3; supports up to 32 volumes per gateway, each up to 32 TiB, totaling up to 1,024 TiB per gateway.
- Distinct from AWS Snowball (one-time physical transfer of bulk data) and AWS DataSync (automated online transfer/sync of data): Storage Gateway provides ongoing, continuous hybrid access to cloud storage rather than a one-time migration job.