Getting Started with AWS Storage Gateway

You can begin using the AWS Storage Gateway in just a few simple steps. To get started, you simply:

• Download the AWS Storage Gateway virtual machine (VM) image from the AWS Management Console.
• Allocate on-premises disks to the installed gateway from either Direct Attached Storage (DAS) disks or Storage Area Network (SAN) disks. The gateway provides low-latency data access by maintaining your on-premises application data on these disks. You can start with either new disks or disks already holding data.
• Activate the gateway by using the AWS Management Console to associate the gateway’s IP Address with your AWS Account and select an AWS Region for the gateway to store uploaded data.
• Use the AWS Management Console to create AWS Storage Gateway volumes and attach these volumes as iSCSI devices to your on-premises applications servers.

By following these steps, you can begin storing data in Amazon S3 using your existing on-premises applications. These applications can now write data to their attached gateway storage volumes. The gateway will maintain this data on-premises to preserve low-latency access, while asynchronously uploading data to Amazon S3.

Service Highlights

Secure – The AWS Storage Gateway securely transfers your data to AWS over SSL and stores data encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.

Durably backed by Amazon S3 – The AWS Storage Gateway durably stores your on-premises application data by uploading it to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, redundantly storing your data on multiple devices across multiple facilities in a Region. Your data is stored as an Amazon EBS snapshot, providing a point-in-time backup that can be restored on-premises or used to instantiate new Amazon EBS volumes.

Compatible – There is no need to re-architect your on-premises applications. The AWS Storage Gateway exposes a standard iSCSI interface that works with your existing applications, while maintaining data on-premises so applications retain the same read/write performance.

Cost-Effective – By making it easy for your on-premises applications to store data on Amazon S3, the AWS Storage Gateway reduces the cost, maintenance, and scaling challenges associated with managing primary and backup storage environments. You pay only for what you use with no long-term commitments.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – The AWS Storage Gateway allows you to easily mirror data from your on-premises applications to applications running on Amazon EC2 in the event you require replacement capacity for disaster recovery purposes, or if you want to leverage Amazon EC2’s on-demand compute capacity for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run your normal workloads. The AWS Storage Gateway is designed to seamlessly integrate with Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, and Amazon EC2 by storing your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 as Amazon EBS snapshots. You can easily access this data from Amazon EC2 by restoring these data snapshots to Amazon EBS volumes and attaching them to your Amazon EC2 instances.

Optimized for Network Efficiency – The AWS Storage Gateway efficiently uses your internet bandwidth to speed up the backup of your on-premises application data to AWS. The AWS Storage Gateway only uploads data that has changed, minimizing the amount of data sent over the internet. You can also use AWS Direct Connect to further increase throughput and reduce your network costs by establishing a dedicated network connection between your on-premises gateway and AWS.

Features

• Gateway-Stored Volumes – Gateway-Stored volumes provide your on-premises applications with low-latency access to their entire data sets, while providing durable, off-site backups. You can create storage volumes up to 1 TB in size and mount them as iSCSI devices from your on-premises application servers. Data written to your Gateway-Stored volumes is stored on your on-premises storage hardware, and asynchronously stored in Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots.

• Data Snapshots – The AWS Storage Gateway provides the ability to create and store point-in-time snapshots of your gateway storage volumes in Amazon S3. These snapshots are stored as Amazon EBS snapshots. You can set the schedule for when snapshots occur or create them ad-hoc. Snapshots are incremental backups, reducing your storage charges. When taking a new snapshot, only the data that has changed since your last snapshot is stored. All snapshot storage is also compressed, further minimizing your storage charges.

• Metrics – You can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance metrics of your gateway storage volumes. This provides insight into your on-premises applications’ throughput, latency, and internet bandwidth to Amazon S3. These metrics are accessible from the AWS Management Console.

• Gateway-Cached Volumes – We plan to support Gateway-Cached volumes in the coming months. Data written to your Gateway-Cached volumes will be stored in Amazon S3, with only a cache of recently written and frequently accessed data stored locally on your on-premises storage hardware. Gateway-Cached volumes will allow you to utilize Amazon S3 for data where higher retrieval latencies are acceptable, such as infrequently accessed data, while maintaining storage on-premises for data where low-latency access is required. This will minimize the need to scale your on-premises storage infrastructure, while still providing your applications with low-latency access to their active data.

Pricing

Gateway Pricing

• $125.00 per activated gateway / month

Storage Pricing

You are billed for the snapshots your gateway stores in Amazon S3. These snapshots are stored and billed as Amazon EBS snapshots.

Data Transfer Pricing

The pricing below is based on data transferred “in” and “out” of AWS by the AWS Storage Gateway.

Rate tiers take into account your aggregate Data Transfer Out usage across AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon VPC.

Use Cases

The AWS Storage Gateway can be used to support a wide variety of use cases, including:

Disaster Recovery and Resilience

Planning for business continuity in the event of a power outage, fire, flood, or other disaster requires investments in redundant infrastructure and staff across multiple datacenters and costly storage replication solutions. The AWS Storage Gateway addresses the data replication challenges of disaster recovery (DR) by enabling you to run your applications on-premises while transparently backing up data off-site to Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots. Amazon S3 redundantly stores these snapshots on multiple devices across multiple facilities, quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. Using Amazon EC2, you can configure virtual machine images of your DR application servers in AWS, and only pay for these servers when you need them. In the event your on-premises infrastructure goes down, you simply launch the Amazon EC2 compute instances you need, restore your snapshots to new Amazon EBS volumes, attach the volumes to your running Amazon EC2 compute instances, and your DR environment is up and running.

Off-site Backup

The AWS Storage Gateway enables your existing on-premises applications to store data backups off-site on Amazon S3’s scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-effective storage service. All data is securely transferred to AWS over SSL and stored encrypted in Amazon S3 using AES 256-bit encryption. The AWS Storage Gateway provides an attractive alternative to the traditional choice of either maintaining costly hardware in multiple datacenters, or dealing with the longer recovery times and operational burden of managing off-site tape storage.

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, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run your normal workloads, you can use the AWS Storage Gateway to mirror your on-premises data to Amazon EC2 instances. If you’re running development and User Acceptance Test (UAT) environments in Amazon EC2 to take advantage of AWS’s on-demand compute capacity, you can use the AWS Storage Gateway to ensure these environments have ongoing access to the latest data from your production systems on-premises. To mirror your on-premises data to Amazon EC2, you can use the AWS Storage Gateway to upload your application data to Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots. You can then use the AWS Management Console or Amazon EC2’s APIs to create Amazon EBS volumes from these snapshots. You can then attach these volumes to your Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, your Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data.

Resources

Developer Resources

view all

• AWS Management Console
• Getting Started Documentation
• Release Notes
• Community Forum

Additional Product Information

• FAQs
• Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement
• Service Health Dashboard

Related Services

• Amazon S3
• Amazon EBS
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon Direct Connect
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Premium Support

Detailed Description

Hardware Requirements

The AWS Storage Gateway’s virtual machine (VM) must be installed on a host with the following minimum requirements:

• VMWare ESXi Hypervisor (v4.1 or v5). A free version is available on the VMWare website.

• 4 Virtual Processors assigned to the VM.

• 7.5GB of RAM assigned to the VM.

• 75GB of disk space for .ova installation and system data.

The AWS Storage Gateway currently supports mounting of its storage volumes using either the Microsoft Windows or Red Hat iSCSI Software Initiators.

How AWS Storage Gateway Works

The following diagram provides an overview of the AWS Storage Gateway deployment:

Once you’ve completed the setup process, you’ll have installed the AWS Storage Gateway’s software appliance on a host in your datacenter, specified an AWS Region to store your backup data, and activated your gateway by associating its IP Address with your AWS Account. You can then create gateway storage volumes and map them to on-premises Direct Attached Storage (DAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN) disks. You can start with either new disks or disks already holding data. You can mount these storage volumes to your on-premises application servers as iSCSI devices. As your on-premises applications write data to and read data from a gateway’s storage volume, this data is retrieved locally from or stored locally on the on-premises DAS or SAN disks you mapped to the gateway’s storage volume.

To prepare and buffer data for upload to Amazon S3, your gateway also stores incoming data in a staging area, referred to as Working Storage. You can use on-premises DAS or SAN disks for Working Storage. Your gateway uploads this Working Storage data over an encrypted SSL connection to the AWS Storage Gateway service running in the AWS cloud. The service then stores the data encrypted in Amazon S3.

When taking a snapshot, the AWS Storage Gateway uploads any changed data from your gateway’s Working Storage to Amazon S3 and then forms an Amazon EBS snapshot from this data. Snapshots are incremental backups that can be initiated on a scheduled or ad-hoc basis. When taking a new snapshot, only the data that has changed since your last snapshot is stored. If you have a volume with 100 GBs of data, but only 5 GBs of data have changed since your last snapshot, only the 5 additional GBs of snapshot data will be stored back to Amazon S3. When you delete a snapshot, only the data not needed for any other snapshot is removed.

You can restore an Amazon EBS snapshot to an on-premises gateway storage volume in the event you need to recover a backup of your data, or use the snapshot as a starting point for a new Amazon EBS volume which you can then attach to an Amazon EC2 instance.

Getting Started Tutorial

Watch this video to learn how you can get started today using the AWS Storage Gateway.

Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.