Announcements at AWS Storage Day

This blog was posted on November 20, 2019, by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist, AWS:

Welcome to AWS Storage Day

Everyone on the AWS team has been working non-stop to make sure that re:Invent 2019 is the biggest and best one yet. Way back in September, the entire team of AWS news bloggers gathered in Seattle, WA, for a set of top-secret briefings. We listened to the teams, read their PRFAQs (Press Release + FAQ), and chose the launches that we wanted to work on. We’ve all been heads-down ever since, reading the docs, putting the services to work, writing drafts, and responding to feedback.

Heads-Up
A week ahead of opening day, we are making the first round of announcements, all of them related to storage. We are doing this in order to spread out the launches a bit, and to give you some time to sign up for the appropriate re:Invent sessions. We’ve written individual posts for some of the announcements, and are covering the rest in summary form in this post.

Regardless of the AWS storage service that you use, I think you’ll find something interesting here. We are launching significant new features for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

All of these features are available and you can start using them today.
Let’s get into it…

EBS
The new Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) feature enables the creation of fully-initialized, full-performance EBS volumes.

FSx for Windows File Server
This file system now includes a list of enterprise-ready features, including remote management, native multi-AZ file systems, user quotas. Several new features make this file system more cost-effective, including data deduplication and support for smaller SSD file systems.

EFS
It is now available in all commercial AWS regions. Check out the EFS Pricing page for pricing in your region, or read my original post, Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions.

DataSync
It was launched at re:Invent 2018. It supports Automated and Accelerated Data Transfer, and can be used for migration, upload and process operations, and backup/DR.

Effective November 1, 2019, we are reducing the per-gigabyte price for AWS DataSync from $0.04/GB to $0.0125/GB. More information on AWS DataSync Pricing page.

The new task scheduling feature allows to periodically execute a task that detects changes and copies them from the source storage system to the destination, with options to run tasks on an hourly, daily, weekly, or custom basis:

We recently added support in the Europe (London, Paris) and Canada (Central) regions. Today we are adding support in the Europe (Stockholm), AsiaPac (Mumbai), South America (São Paulo), AsiaPac (Hong Kong), and AWS GovCloud (US-East) regions. As a result, DataSync is now available in all commercial and GovCloud regions. More on DataSync Storage Day

Storage Gateway
It is a hybrid cloud storage service that gives on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. With this launch, you now have access to a new set of enterprise features:

HA – It now includes a range of health checks when running within a vSphere HA (VMware HA) environment, and can now recover from most service interruptions in under 60s. In the unlikely event that a recovery is necessary, sessions will be maintained and applications should continue to operate unaffected after a pause. The new gateway health checks integrate automatically with VMware through the VM heartbeat. You have the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the heartbeat from within VMware:

More on to Deploy a Highly Available AWS Storage Gateway on a vSphere

Enhanced Metrics – If you enable Amazon CloudWatch Integration, Storage Gateway now publishes cache utilization, access pattern, throughput, and I/O metrics to CloudWatch and makes them visible in the Monitoring tab for each gateway. More on Monitoring Gateways

More Maintenance Options – You now have additional control over the software updates that are applied to each Storage Gateway. Mandatory security updates are always applied promptly, and you can control the schedule for feature updates. You have multiple options including day of the week and day of the month, with more coming soon. More on Managing Storage Gateway Updates

Increased Performance – Storage Gateway now delivers higher read performance when used as a VTLhttps://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/, and for reading data and listing directories when used as a File Gateway, providing faster access to data managed through these gateways.

Amazon S3
We launched Same-Region Replication (SRR) in mid-September, giving the ability to configure in-region replication based on bucket, prefix, or object tag. When an object is replicated using SRR, the metadata: Access Control Lists (ACLs), and objects tags associated with the object are also replicated. Once SRR has been configured on a source bucket, any changes to these elements will trigger a replication to the destination bucket. More ont S3 Replication
Today we are launching a SLA for S3 Replication, along with the ability to monitor the status of each of your replication configurations. More on Replication Update: Replication SLA, Metrics, and Event

AWS Snowball Edge
This is, as I have already shared, a large-scale data migration and edge computing device with on-board compute and storage capabilities. We recently launched 3 free training courses that will help you to learn more about this unique and powerful device:
• Snowball Edge Getting Started
• Snowball Edge Logistics and Planning
• Using Snowball Edge

You may also read about Data Migration Best Practices with Snowball Edge.