Amazon Web Services Offering Storage Backup and DR Gateway

Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides enterprises with a new option to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage.

The AWS Storage Gateway connects a software appliance with cloud-based storage for integration between IT environments and AWS storage infrastructure. The service provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

It supports industry standard storage protocols, enabling customers to take advantage of cloud based storage without re-architecting existing applications.

"With the AWS Storage Gateway, we’re providing businesses yet another way to easily take advantage of AWS’s secure, scalable and cost-effective cloud storage for use with their on-premises applications," said Alyssa Henry, General Manager of AWS Storage Services. "The AWS Storage Gateway works with your existing applications using a standard iSCSI interface, securely transfers your data to AWS over SSL, and stores data encrypted at rest in Amazon S3."

The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand compute capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads. To take advantage of this compute capacity, enterprises can mirror data to Amazon EC2 instances by using the AWS Storage Gateway to upload the data to Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots. Amazon EBS volumes can be created from these snapshots (using either the AWS Management Console or Amazon EC2’s APIs) and attached to Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, enterprises’ Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data to do any processing or computation desired.

IT-Lifeline provides data vaulting and disaster recovery services to regulated industries such as banking and healthcare organizations. "We look forward to using the AWS Storage Gateway ourselves, as well as integrating it into our Blackcloud service for our customers," said Matthew Gerber, CEO at IT-Lifeline. "With this capability, our customers and our company can take advantage of simplified data vaulting and practically infinite elasticity for disaster recovery needs."

"Growth in our enterprise applications continues to drive growth in storage costs. The AWS Storage Gateway will enable Coeur d’Alene Mines to take advantage of the elasticity of the AWS Cloud, driving down our costs for data storage and computing infrastructure required for disaster recovery," said Donald J. Moss, Vice President of Information Systems, Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp..

Datapipe, Inc. offers solutions for managing and securing mission-critical IT services. "We develop and implement solutions for our clients to reliably store and backup their critical application data. Many of our clients store user-generated content locally. Traditional off-site backup products are often costly to maintain and not geared toward automation for recovery. A cost-effective and reliable alternative, AWS’s Storage Gateway addresses these issues by plugging seamlessly into the environments we manage for our customers, providing low-latency data access, while encrypting and snapshotting data to AWS’s cloud storage infrastructure," said Ed Laczynski, VP Cloud Strategy at Datapipe.

Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125/month per installed gateway and comes with a 60 day free trial. Snapshot storage pricing starts at only $0.14 per gigabyte per month.