AWS Storage Gateway is a service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organizations on-premises IT environment and AWS’s storage infrastructure.
The service allows you to securely store data in the AWS cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage. The AWS Storage Gateway supports industry-standard storage protocols that work with your existing applications. It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all of your data encrypted in Amazon S3.
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AWS Storage Gateway supports three configurations:
• Gateway-Cached Volumes: You can store your primary data in Amazon S3, and retain your frequently accessed data locally. Gateway-Cached volumes provide substantial cost savings on primary storage, minimize the need to scale your storage on-premises, and retain low-latency access to your frequently accessed data.
• Gateway-Stored Volumes: In the event you need low-latency access to your entire data set, you can configure your on-premises data gateway to store your primary data locally, and asynchronously back up point-in-time snapshots of this data to Amazon S3. Gateway-Stored volumes provide durable and inexpensive off-site backups that you can recover locally or from Amazon EC2 if, for example, you need replacement capacity for disaster recovery.
• Gateway-Virtual Tape Library (Gateway-VTL): With Gateway-VTL you can have a limitless collection of virtual tapes. Each virtual tape can be stored in a Virtual Tape Library backed by Amazon S3 or a Virtual Tape Shelf backed by Amazon Glacier. The Virtual Tape Library exposes an industry standard iSCSI interface, which provides your backup application with on-line access to the virtual tapes. When you no longer require
immediate or frequent access to data contained on a virtual tape, you can use your backup application to move it from its Virtual Tape Library to your Virtual Tape Shelf in order to further reduce your storage costs.
The AWS Storage Gateway enables your existing on-premise to cloud backup applications to store primary backups on Amazon S3’s scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-effective storage service. You can create Gateway-Cached storage volumes and mount them as iSCSI devices to your on-premises backup
application servers. All data is securely transferred to AWS over SSL and stored encrypted in Amazon S3 using AES 256-bit encryption. Using Gateway-Cached volumes provides an attractive alternative to the traditional choice of maintaining and scaling costly storage hardware on-premises.
For scenarios where you want to keep your primary data or backups on-premises, you can use Gateway-Stored volumes to keep this data locally, and backup this data off-site to Amazon S3. Gateway-Stored volumes provide an attractive
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alternative to dealing with the longer recovery times and operational burden of managing off-site tape storage for backups.
There are many benefits of using AWS Storage Gateway for SQL Server backups:
• Secure: The AWS Storage Gateway securely transfers your data to AWS over SSL and stores data encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.
• Durably backed by Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier: The AWS Storage Gateway durably stores your on-premises application data by uploading it to Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier redundantly store data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier also perform regular, systematic data integrity checks and are built to be automatically self-healing.
• Compatible: There is no need to re-architect your on-premises applications. Gateway-Cached volumes and Gateway-Stored volumes expose a standard iSCSI block disk device interface and Gateway-VTL presents a standard iSCSI virtual tape library interface.
• Cost-Effective: By making it easy for your on-premises applications to store data on Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier, AWS Storage Gateway reduces the cost, maintenance, and scaling challenges associated with managing primary, backup and archive storage environments. You pay only for what you use with no long-term commitments.
• Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services: Gateway-Stored volumes and Gateway-Cached volumes are designed to seamlessly integrate with Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, and Amazon EC2 by enabling you to store point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 as Amazon EBS snapshots for future recovery on-premises or in Amazon EC2. This integration allows you to easily mirror data from your on-premises applications to applications running on Amazon EC2 in disaster recovery (DR) and on-demand compute capacity cases. Gateway-VTL integrates with Amazon Glacier and allows you to cost effectively and durably store your archive and long-term backup data.
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• Optimized for Network Efficiency: The AWS Storage Gateway efficiently uses your Internet bandwidth to speed up the upload of your on-premises application data to AWS. The AWS Storage Gateway only uploads data that has changed, minimizing the amount of data sent over the Internet. You can also use AWS Direct Connect to further increase throughput and reduce your network costs by establishing a dedicated network connection between your on-premises gateway and AWS.