The Amazon Web Services cloud portfolio grows yet again with the beta launch of AWS Storage Gateway, a software appliance designed to connect on-premises applications seamlessly and securely with the Amazon S3 storage cloud.
The idea is to provide a smooth way to back up point-in-time snapshots of application data for backup and disaster recovery purposes by way of iSCSI and other widely supported transfer protocols. The AWS Storage Gateway keeps backup data locally available for low latency, but asynchronously backs it up to the cloud with full AES 256 encryption, according to the official blog entry. And those snapshots are stored as Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which can be used to instantiate new cloud volumes or restored on-premises straight up.
A neat side-benefit is the fact that for moments when you need more capacity, or for remote disaster recovery, or simply to begin taking advantage cloud infrastructure, AWS Storage Gateway lets you mirror your on-premises data into Amazon EC2 instances. Pricing is $125 per activated gateway per month, but with your first activation you get 60 days free to try it out.
As usual, Amazon Web Services has put together an intriguing offering that only enhances the value of its suite as a whole. Now, there are other cloud storage gateway vendors on the market – TwinStrata and StorSimple both make iSCSI a key part of their cloud storage play, for starters. But few other vendors can match Amazon Web Services when it comes to the breadth of its cloud ecosystem.
Agreed that this is an important expansion to Amazon’s overall cloud service portfolio. But when digging into the operational and ROI details, there are some important points to note — especially for larger enterprise-scale organizations.
The suggested deployment for Amazon Storage Gateway is that it be deployed as a gateway (inline) to customer’s existing SAN and direct attach storage that sends data to the Amazon cloud. While that may work for small business deployments, many enterprise customers will not want the Amazon Storage Gateway, which does not have high availability features like non-disruptive patch updates and multi-patching, become a single point of failure.
There is laso a business decision to be made on whether they want to use a cloud on-ramp (gateway) that locks them into a specific cloud or have a solution that can work across the range of enterprise-focused cloud services – Amazon, Azure, AT&T, Rackspace, Google, HP, IBM/Nirvanix etc.
Finally, there is also the question of what capabilities still need be deployed on-premise to meet IT and business goals – be it enterprise-level scale & availability, needed certifications (e.g. Microsoft, VMware), application consistency for backups or cost reduction via data reduction technologies (de-dupe, WAN optim, etc).
More thoughts on our blog this week: http://www.storsimple.com/blog/bid/101464/Amazon-Storage-Gateway-Welcome
Mark: Thanks much for StorSimple’s perspective on Amazon’s announcement. How does StorSimple address the points you made?