AWS Storage Gateway

http://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/

by bpuvanathasan • 15 years ago

103 31 15 years ago

aws.amazon.com

donky_cong• 15 years ago

So you are basically paying 125$+ to have S3 cached locally and get an iSCSI interface ?

nl• 15 years ago

Which is worth it.

The price of enterprise backup solutions is crazy.

nburger• 15 years ago

Note that the $125 "gateway" fee is minor compared with the storage/transfer fees themselves - $0.14/GB/month for storage, for example. At that rate, a small 5 TB volume is already $700/month.

mopoke• 15 years ago

From my brief reading of Werner's blog post, it seems that this is very similar to what Nasuni have been selling.

latchkey• 15 years ago

I don't have a personal need for this right now, but the fact that it stores the data as EBS volumes is pretty cool. I could imagine having local servers automatically mirrored so that they could be failed over to instances on ec2. Very powerful stuff indeed.

cperciva2• 15 years ago

Note that the mirroring is asynchronous -- if your local server fails you can replace it with an EC2 instance, but you lose anything since the last snapshot.

ridruejo2• 15 years ago

If I read it correctly, the server can fail but because the data is stored via iSCSI, it will not actually be lost (unless it is the appliance itself that fails)

kondro3• 15 years ago

Not since the last snapshot. It syncs as close to real-time as possible without the latency and network speeds affecting the performance locally.

This solution isn't designed to replace fault-tolerance on local hardware. It is for close to realtime offsite replication and backup.

Data in S3 is stored in at least three geographically separate locations and snapshots are very fast and very efficient on storage space.

The final major advantage you get through a solution such as this is that if you do have your primary site go down (floods, tornados, etc), you can bring up all your existing images via EC2 without having to have a bunch of redundant hardware sitting around waiting for disaster to strike.

And what do you pay for this? $125/month plus a per GB storage cost CHEAPER than enterprise storage generally is.

bprater• 15 years ago

Can someone give a brief explanation of what this service is good for?

chubs• 15 years ago

It sounds to me like enterprisey dropbox: It backs up your files from your local file server to the aws cloud, and if your server dies, bung in a new one and all your files will reappear. Great idea, although maybe something you could already do with dropbox?

soult• 15 years ago

As far as I understood the product page and Werner Vogels' blog post[1] it does not run on file level, but on filesystem level. So you won't be able to access single files from within S3, but rather have whole disk images stored in Amazon S3, ready to be restored back to your local datacenter or to be mounted on EC2 servers.

1: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS-Storage-...

Ecio78• 15 years ago

Except you can use it to power on EC2 machines with those data, so you can use it for dealing with requests spikes, for offsite data elaboration or even Disaster Recovery of your onpremises infrastructure on Amazon.

tiernano4• 15 years ago

ok, couple of things to start with:

1: iSCSI can be seen as a USB drive over a network. you plug in, your machine sees it as a drive, you write data. you can unplug, and then plug in somewhere else, and as long as the file system is readable on the new machine, you can get your files. 2: the appliance AWS are offering gives you iSCSI volumes, backed by DAS or SAN storage locally, but also backed by S3 storage in AWS.

So, basically, its like having a drive, automagically backed up to S3, but S3 does not need to know anything about what is on the drive. it could be VMs, Videos, your mail server... anything really.

ridruejo2• 15 years ago

More details at Werner's post

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS-Storage-...

jeffbarr• 15 years ago

And even more details in mine:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/01/the-aws-storage-gateway-i...

kondro3• 15 years ago

Sounds like a great idea. I can't wait until they release Gateway-Cached Volumes myself as it better suits my use-case.

tiernano4• 15 years ago

the volumes are cached... from reading the post, you write synchronously to the iSCSI device, which is Asynchronously sent to S3

moe2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if that's what kondro meant but what I would like to see is a virtually unlimited size ("elastic") volume where the local disk acts only as the cache.

This would make a wide range of big-storage use-cases ridiculously trivial - those where only ~10% of the data-set is frequently accessed.

I.e. one could lazily scale the expensive local storage with throughput-demand, while the S3 backing store takes care of the long-tail (which can easily be many terabytes long when you're dealing with media files).

yalogin• 15 years ago

This should make EMC sit up and take notice. Amazon is doing great. I would have expected dropbox to do this after icloud was released. They should atleast mimic this now.

bwarp• 15 years ago

This is really cool. Having just done a large and complicated S3 integration into a legacy soup of 20 year old filesystem based document management kludge, this would have made life much easier (and considerably cheaper!).

Not only that, it solves a lot of problems such as dangerously storing backup snapshots on-site, archival and easy deployment and access to S3's CDN functionality.

Sold as far as I am concerned!

(Yes I know it's expensive, but it's cheaper than buying something in-house and employing another hairless monkey to manage it).

AWS Storage Gateway

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