AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance

This is an abstract of an article written by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist, AWS.

New – AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance

AWS Storage Gateway connects on-premises applications to AWS storage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon Glacier.

It runs in existing virtualized environment and is visible to applications and client OSs as a file share, a local block volume or a VTL. The resulting hybrid storage model gives customers the ability to use their AWS Storage Gateways for backup, archiving, DR, cloud data processing, storage tiering, and migration.

New Hardware Appliance
Today we are making Storage Gateway available as a hardware appliance, adding to the existing support for VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and Amazon EC2. This means that you can now make use of Storage Gateway in situations where you do not have a virtualized environment, server-class hardware or IT staff with the specialized skills that are needed to manage them. You can order appliances from Amazon.com for delivery to branch offices, warehouses, and ‘outpost’ offices that lack dedicated IT resources.

Setup is quick and easy, and gives access to three storage solutions:

File Gateway – A file interface to Amazon S3, accessible via NFS or SMB. The files are stored as S3 objects, allowing to make use of specialized S3 features such as lifecycle management and cross-region replication. You can trigger AWS Lambda functions, run Amazon Athena queries, and use Amazon Macie to discover and classify sensitive data.

Volume Gateway – Cloud-backed storage volumes, accessible as local iSCSI volumes. Gateways can be configured to cache frequently accessed data locally, or to store a full copy of all data locally. You can create EBS snapshots of the volumes and use them for DR or data migration.

Tape Gateway – A cloud-based VTL, accessible via iSCSI, so you can replace your on-premises tape infrastructure, without changing your backup workflow.

To learn more about each of these solutions, read What is AWS Storage Gateway.

The Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance is based on a specially configured Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 Rack Server that is pre-loaded with Storage Gateway software. It has two Intel Xeon processors, 128GB of memory, 6TB of usable SSD storage for locally cached data, redundant power supplies, and you can order one from Amazon.com:

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If you have an Amazon Business account (they’re free) you can use a purchase order for the transaction. In addition to simplifying deployment, using this standardized configuration helps to assure consistent performance for local applications.

The Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance is available and you can purchase one today. Start in the AWS Storage Gateway Console.