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Amazon Web Services has announced the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides enterprises with a new way to securely upload data to the AWS cloud.
The AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to integrate on-premises IT environments and the AWS storage infrastructure.
The new AWS service provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Moreover, The AWS Storage Gateway supports industry-standard storage protocols, enabling customers to take advantage of cloud-based storage without rearchitecting existing applications, the company said.
“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, in a statement. “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.”
In addition, AWS officials said the AWS Storage Gateway enables users 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 on-premises data to Amazon EC2 instances by using the AWS Storage Gateway to upload the data to Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots, the company said. Amazon EBS volumes can easily 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, AWS officials said.
“We develop and implement solutions for our clients to reliably store and back up their critical application data,” said Ed Laczynski, vice president of cloud strategy at Datapipe, which provides solutions for managing and securing mission-critical IT services. “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’ 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’ cloud storage infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, IT-Lifeline, a provider of data vaulting and disaster recovery services to regulated industries such as banking and health care organizations, plans to use the new AWS storage service.
“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, in a statement. “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,” said Donald Moss, vice president of information systems at Coeur d’Alene Mines, in a statement “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.”
Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125 a month per installed gateway and comes with a 60-day free trial. AWS officials said snapshot storage pricing starts at $0.14 per gigabyte per month. More details on the service can be found here.