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How Is AWS Storage Gateway Priced?
AWS Storage Gateway is designed to establish a secure connection between the AWS cloud storage infrastructure and on-premises software appliances. You can use Storage Gateway to maintain data security while storing data in the AWS cloud at scale.
AWS Storage Gateway pricing consists of several components—storage pricing, request pricing, and data transfer pricing. Each of these components has their own official prices, which vary according to market prices, usage, and discounts when applicable. Your total Storage Gateway bill will be composed of all of the components.
This is part of our series of articles about AWS costs.
Related content: read our guide to AWS Storage Gateway
In this article:
- AWS Storage Gateway Pricing Concepts
- AWS Storage Gateway Pricing
- AWS Storage Gateway Cost Optimization
- AWS Storage Optimization with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
AWS Storage Gateway Pricing Concepts
Storage Gateway billing is comprised of the following components:
- Storage pricing—includes all fees of any storage services used with the gateway (such as S3 or EBS).
- Request pricing—charges you for data operations performed on Amazon storage services via the gateway.
- Data transfer pricing—charges you for any data transferred out of your storage service into the gateway appliance.
- Hardware appliance pricing—if you choose to deploy Storage Gateway as a physical appliance, there is an additional cost for purchasing the appliance.
Related content: Read our guide to AWS storage costs
Pricing Per Type of Storage Gateway
Below we provide more details on pricing for four types of storage gateway offered by Amazon: S3 File Gateway, FSx File Gateway, Volume Gateway, and Tape Gateway.
Amazon S3 File Gateway Pricing
S3 File Gateway offers a file interface that lets you store files as objects within S3. You can do this by using the industry-standard SMB and NFS protocols, which also let you access these files from your local data center or EC2. Alternatively, you can access your files as objects directly in S3 Storage.
Storage pricing:
- Files are stored as Amazon S3 objects and billed accordingly.
- Data that the gateway writes to AWS storage is billed at $0.01/GB
- Files stored in Amazon S3 are billed as S3 requests
Related content: Read our guide to S3 pricing
Amazon FSx File Gateway pricing
FSx File Gateway offers fast and low-latency, on-premises access to fully-managed, scalable and highly reliable file shares. You can use the SMB protocol to access your file shares in the cloud. The gateway is priced at $0.69/hour, while storage is billed according to the Amazon FSx for Windows capacity.
Related content: Read our guide to FSx Gateway
Volume Gateway Pricing
Volume Gateway offers cloud storage for on-premises applications through the iSCSI protocol. You can asynchronously back up data written to these applications as point-in-time snapshots of volumes. You can then store this data in the cloud as EBS snapshots.
The service provides a native snapshot scheduler for backing up on-premises Volume Gateway volumes. Alternatively, you can use AWS Backup. Both backup options store volume backups as EBS snapshots within the AWS cloud. Each snapshot is an incremental backup capturing only changed blocks. To minimize storage charges, these snapshots are compressed.
Pricing:
- You pay $0.023/GB for volume storage
- Regular charges apply for EBS snapshots, snapshot deletion is free
- You pay $0.01/GB for requests the gateway writes to AWS storage
Tape Gateway Pricing
Tape Gateway lets you use AWS-based virtual tapes instead of on-premises physical tapes, using the storage industry-standard iSCSI protocol. You can make this change without having to change your existing backup workflows. The service supports many types of backup applications, letting you write to an almost unlimited set of virtual tapes.
AWS stores virtual tapes in S3. However, when there is no longer any need for frequent or immediate access to this data, you can move it to one of the S3 archival tiers. Storage pricing is as follows:
- Virtual tapes are billed at $0.023/GB-month
- In S3 Glacier, archived virtual tapes are billed at $0.004/GB-month
- In S3 Glacier Deep Archive, virtual tapes are billed at $0.00099/GB-month
Request pricing:
- Data that your gateway writes to AWS storage is billed at $0.01/GB
- Retrieval of virtual tapes from S3 Glacier is billed at $0.01/GB, or $0.02/GB for Deep Glacier
- Moving virtual tapes from Glacier to Glacier Deep Archive is billed at $0.0032/GB
- Archival of virtual tapes is free
- Deletion of virtual tapes within 90 days after archiving them in Glacier incurs a prorated charge of $0.012/GB
- Deletion of virtual tapes within 180 days after archiving them in Glacier Deep Archive incurs a prorated charge of $0.00099/GB
AWS Storage Gateway Data Transfer Pricing
If you transfer data between the Storage Gateway Service and a gateway appliance deployed in Amazon EC2, data transfer is free, as long as the Gateway Service and the gateway appliance are in the same Amazon region.
If the gateway is deployed within Amazon, but in a different region, the charge for data transfer depends on the region. In the US East region, the cost is $0.01/GB. The cost goes up to $0.02 in the Europe (Vodafone), Asia Pacific (KDDI), and the US West region.
To transfer data between the Storage Gateway Service and a gateway appliance deployed on-premises, you will pay the following data transfer rates:
- The first GB/month is free
- The next 9.999 TB/month is billed at $0.09/GB
- The next 40 TB/month is billed at $0.085/GB
- The next 100 TB/month is billed at $0.07/GB
- All data transfer over 150 TB/month is billed at $0.05/GB
Related content: Read our guide to AWS data transfer cost
Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance Pricing
The Amazon Storage Gateway can be deployed as a software service or a hardware appliance. Prices for hardware appliances are as follows, excluding duties, taxes or shipping costs:
- 5 TB cache—$12,360
- 12 TB cache—$18,499
AWS Storage Gateway Cost Optimization
Here are a few ways you can optimize your AWS Storage Gateway costs.
File Gateways
The file gateway updates your S3 buckets incrementally. If your buckets have versioning or replication enabled, this means the gateway will create multiple copies of each object. There are two ways to reduce costs:
- Disable versioning or replication if it is not needed.
- Evaluate the expected cost of versioning and replication, and adjust configuration accordingly. For example, check how the number of replicas will impact storage costs.
- Use lifecycle rules that control the number of versions for each object.
Volume Gateways
Volume gateways store data as EBS snapshots. Over time, the gateway can create a large number of snapshots, and storage costs can grow. To optimize your costs:
- Use the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM). It lets you automatically delete EBS snapshots at specific intervals or based on certain criteria.
- Set up AWS Backup, integrates with Volume Gateways. AWS Backup can help you schedule EBS snapshots and define lifecycle rules.
Tape Gateways
Tape Gateways store data in Amazon S3 Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive. These cold storage tiers have special data retrieval and deletion costs. Carefully plan data retrieval or deletion:
- Data retrieval or transition to warm/hot storage—plan the amount of data you need to retrieve or move back to warm storage and consider the extra fees for data transfer.
- Early deletion—plan the frequency and quantity of data you intend to delete. In S3 Glacier, you are charged for early deletion of data that is less than three months old. In S3 Glacier Deep Archive, you are charged if data is less than six months old.
Related content: Read our guide to AWS cost optimization
AWS Storage Optimization with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP capacity can scale into the petabytes, and it supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports hybrid & multi-cloud architectures.
Learn more in Hybrid Cloud Storage Services: Cloud Volumes ONTAP and AWS Storage Gateway Comparison.
