More about Cloud Migration
- Azure StorSimple EOL: Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Hybrid Cloud Management
- Refactoring Applications to Kubernetes in Cloud Migrations
- The War Over the Cloud Has Ended (and the Winner Might Surprise You)
- Modern Data Estate: What IT Leaders Need To Know
- Strategies for AWS Migration: The New 7th R Explained
- Cloud Computing Deployment Models and Architectures
- Cloud Adoption Strategy: What’s the Best Approach for Your Organization?
- What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Process and Tools
- Hybrid Cloud Strategy: A Winning Model for Enterprises
- Google Cloud Architecture and Building Your Own Solution Architecture
- SnapMirror in the Cloud: New Use Cases for NetApp’s Data Replication Technology
- 8 Digital Transformation Technologies and Their Business Impact
- What Is Digital Transformation in Banking?
- Digital Transformation in Healthcare: 4 Key Trends
- Digital Transformation: Examples from 5 Industries
- The Future of Cloud Computing: 5 Trends You Must Know About
- 5 Types of Digital Transformation and the Technologies that Power Them
- Digital Transformation Strategy: 6 Tips for Success
- Kubernetes Data Mobility with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- Application Migration to Azure: 4 Approaches and One Migration Tool
- Cloud First Strategy: Challenges, Considerations, and Best Practices
- Application Migration to AWS: Free Tools to Ease Your Migration
- Why Cloud Adoption Fails and 6 Tips for Success
- Cloud Application Migration: A Practical Guide
- AWS Snowball vs Snowmobile: Data -Migration Options Compared
- AWS Snowball Edge: Data Shipping and Compute at the Edge
- AWS Snowmobile: Migrate Data to the Cloud With the World’s Biggest Hard Disk
- AWS Snowball Family: Options, Process, and Best Practices
- AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF): 6 Migration Perspectives
- Top 3 Cloud Adoption Frameworks: Your Path To The Cloud
- AWS Snowball Pricing Simplified
- Azure Cloud Adoption Framework: The 9 Methodologies Explained
- Cloud Roadmap: Mapping Out Your Path To The Cloud
- Hybrid Deployment on Google Cloud: Meet Google Anthos
- 3 Ways to Create an Azure Migrate Project
- Azure Migration Step by Step: Discover, Migrate, Optimize, and Monitor
- Migrate from VMware to Azure: The Basics and a Quick Tutorial
- Migrate SQL Server to Azure: Options, Tools, and a Quick Tutorial
- Migrate Databases to Azure: 3 Quick Tutorials
- 4 Ways to Migrate SQL to Azure
- Azure Migration Program: 4 Key Elements
- Azure Migrate: Key Components and a 4-Step Migration Plan
- Cloud Journey: 6 Stages of Cloud Adoption
- 5 Azure Data Migration Tools You Should Be Using
- Azure Migration Tools: One-Click Migration for VMs and Data
- Typical Mistakes and Misconceptions Business Leaders Have About Hybrid and Multicloud
- Google Cloud PostgreSQL: Managed or Self-Managed?
- AWS Storage Gateway: Connecting Your On-Premise Storage to the Amazon Cloud
- Azure PostgreSQL: Managed or Self-Managed?
- Cloud Scalability: How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Stores Petabytes of Data
- AWS Migration: Understanding the Process and Solving 5 Key Challenges
- Google Cloud Pricing vs AWS: A Fair Comparison?
- VMware Cloud Services: A New Option for Hybrid Cloud Management
- AWS PostgreSQL: Managed or Self-Managed?
- Google Cloud MySQL: MySQL as a Service vs. Self Managed in the Cloud
- Azure MySQL: MySQL as a Service vs. Self-Managed in the Cloud
- AWS MySQL: MySQL as a Service vs. Self Managed in the Cloud
- Cloud Adoption for Financial Companies
- VMware on AWS: Architecture and Service Options
- VMware on Google Cloud: A Deployment Roadmap
- VMware on Azure: One-Step Migration to the Cloud
- Better in the Cloud: Workloads Gartner Says You Should Move to the Cloud Now
- 3 Cloud Migration Approaches and Their Pros and Cons
- Oracle on Google Cloud: Two Deployment Options
- How to Upload Files to Azure Blob Storage with AzCopy, PowerShell, and More
- Oracle on Azure: Fully Managed vs Self Managed
- Azure SQL Server: Managed Service vs Self Managed
- Google Partners with NetApp on New Bare Metal Solution in the Cloud
- AWS Database Migration Service: Copy-Paste Your Database to Amazon
- SQL Server on Google Cloud: Two Deployment Options
- GCP Migration with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- SQL Server in AWS: Two Deployment Options
- Azure Database Migration Service: Automate Your Cloud DB Migration
- Azure Managed Service Provider: How to Save Time and Reduce Cloud Overhead
- Hybrid Cloud Storage: The Best of Both Worlds
- Hybrid Cloud Storage Solutions for AWS Compared: Storage Gateway vs Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- AWS Oracle: Two Options for Migrating Your Oracle DB to Amazon
- Migrating Physical Server to AWS: Now Free with AWS CloudEndure
- Azure Hybrid Cloud:
Azure in Your Local Data Center - What Is a Lift and Shift Cloud Migration?
- Google Cloud Migration Tools: Copying 1GB or 500TB? Learn How
- VMC on AWS Vs. Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- AWS Cloud Migration Services: Don’t Migrate Alone
- 5 Steps to the Cloud: AWS Migration Checklist
- Setting up Storage Gateway with Amazon EC2
- VMware Cloud on AWS: How Fujitsu Saves Millions Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- SQL Server End of Life Challenges and How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Can Help
- The Cloud Tiering Service Architecture: How We Get Cold Data from Your Data Center to the Cloud
- Cloud Data Integration 101: Benefits, Challenges, and Tools
- Google Cloud Migration: Why and How to Make the Move
- What’s the Easiest Way to Start Using the Cloud? Three Cloud Onboarding Approaches
- AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: Choosing the Best Cloud Provider for You
- Cloud Migration Tools: Transferring Your Data with Ease
- Azure Migration Strategy: Four Steps to the Cloud
- 11-Step Azure Migration Checklist
- AWS Migration Strategy: The 6 Rs in Depth
- Officeworks Adopts a Cloud-First Strategy with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- Azure Migration: The Keys to a Successful Enterprise Migration to Azure
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP: Cloud Migration Case Studies
- One Cloud Out of Many: Why Enterprises Are Turning to Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures
May 6, 2021
Topics: Cloud Volumes ONTAP Data MigrationAWSElementary5 minute read
Organizations that wish to combine their on-premise storage systems with cloud services must ensure that their storage is compatible with the cloud environment. For those who use the Amazon cloud, the answer is the AWS Storage Gateway, which enables a hybrid cloud deployment with seamless integration between the cloud and on-premise, offline AWS-compatible storage. The Storage Gateway is often an essential component of an AWS Migration strategy.
In this article, you will learn:
- What Is AWS Storage Gateway?
- AWS Storage Gateway Types and Architecture Options
- AWS Storage Gateway Pricing
- Optimizing AWS Storage Gateway Performance
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS Migration and Hybrid Storage
What Is AWS Storage Gateway?
Amazon Storage Gateway is a storage solution that you deploy on-premises, and allows you to integrate Amazon cloud storage with on-premise storage systems, creating a hybrid storage environment.
You can deploy Storage Gateway and allow on-premise systems to access Amazon services like S3, Glacier, and EBS. It can also allow Amazon services to access on-premise resources, so that Amazon services for machine learning, monitoring, logging, etc. can be applied to data that is stored on-premises.
AWS Storage Gateway uses standard protocols, including NFS, SMB and iSCSI, so it allows on-premise systems to access cloud resources seamlessly, just as they would access on-premise storage.
A key benefit of Storage Gateway is that it uses local caching to provide frequently-used cloud data to on-premise systems, without the high latency of accessing the public cloud.
AWS Storage Gateway Types and Architecture Options
AWS Storage Gateway lets you connect local storage to cloud storage in three ways: by saving individual files to cloud storage, by mounting a cached or stored volume as a local drive, or by exposing cloud storage as a tape interface, which can connect to legacy backup systems.
The following sections show three AWS Storage Gateway architectures supporting these three use cases.
File Gateway—Local Access to S3 for Files
AWS File Gateway lets you store local files as objects in an S3 bucket, creating an S3 storage gateway. S3 buckets can be mounted locally as Network File System (NFS) drives, or you can store and retrieve files directly using the SMB protocol.
You can store files to S3 Standard, S3 Infrequent Access and S3 One Zone IA. File ownership and operation timestamps are stored in the user-metadata of the relevant objects in S3.
Source: Amazon Web Services
Volume Gateway—Local Access to S3 and EBS for Disk Volumes
The Volume Gateway provides access to Amazon EBS volumes, using the iSCSI block protocol. There are two ways of working with Volume Gateway:
- Cached Volumes—stores frequently accessed data locally using EBS, with Amazon S3 as main data storage. You can create a storage volume of up to 32TB and connect it to local systems as an iSCSI device. The storage volume then stores any infrequently-used data automatically to S3, reducing the load on local store, while using cloud storage in a cost-effective manner.
- Stored Volumes—treats your local storage as main data storage, but performs asynchronous backup to Amazon S3, as an EBS snapshot. This gives you an off-site backup of a local drive. The Stored Volume is mounted as an iSCSI device within on-premise applications. Stored Volumes can be 1GB to 16TB in size.
Source: YouTube, by Amazon Web Services
Tape Gateway
The Tape Gateway uses a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) interface, and lets you store data on virtual tapes, with the actual data stored in Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier, or Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. The idea is to replace physical tapes with a compatible interface that lets you store data on Amazon.
You can connect the Tape Gateway to existing backup devices using the iSCSI protocol, maintaining existing backup workflows and systems. Tape Gateway lets you save data directly to your S3 buckets, or use third-party backup services like NetBackup and Veeam.
Source: Amazon Web Services
AWS Storage Gateway Pricing
AWS has differential pricing depending on the type of gateway you use—file gateway, volume gateway or tape gateway. You can also use an AWS Calculator to help you plan your overall budget. Prices we mention in this section are subject to change—see the official pricing page for up-to-date prices.
File Gateway Pricing
Any data you store on Amazon S3 via the file gateway is priced using standard S3 pricing. In addition, you pay $0.01 per GB written to cloud storage by your local storage gateway.
Volume Gateway Pricing
EBS snapshots created from your Stored Volumes are billed using standard EBS pricing. In addition:
- Volume storage is billed at $0.023 per GB-month
- Data written to cloud storage by your gateway is billed at $0.01 per GB
Tape Gateway Pricing
The tape gateway is priced differently depending on the S3 storage tier you use for your virtual tapes:
- $0.023 per GB-month for S3
- $0.004 per GB-month for S3 Glacier
- $0.00099 per GB-month for S3 Glacier Deep Archiv
In addition, requests are billed as follows:
-
$0.01 per GB for data written to AWS storage from the local gateway
-
$0.01 per GB for tape retrieval from S3 Glacier
-
$0.02 per GB for tape retrieval from S3 Glacier Deep Archive
-
$0.0032 per GB for moving a virtual tape from S3 Glacier to Deep Archive
Optimizing AWS Storage Gateway Performance
Here are three ways you can improve AWS Storage Gateway performance.
Use High-Performance Disks
You can optimize Storage Gateway performance by adding high-performance disks, such as solid state drives (SSDs) and NVMe controllers. Instead of using Microsoft Hyper-V NTFS, prefer to attach virtual disks directly to VMs on a storage area network (SAN).
In general, increasing disk performance can increase throughput and increase I/O operations per second (IOPS) for Storage Gateway.
Use Separate Physical Disks for Gateway and Cache
When setting up a gateway disk, do not use the same underlying physical disk disk for the upload buffer and cache storage. For example, in VMware ESXi, the default physical storage resource is represented as a virtual disk. When deploying a gateway VM, you select a data store to store the VM files. Make sure that the virtual disk used for the gateway VM is on a separate physical disk than the virtual disk used for the buffer and cache.
Use a Larger Block Size for Tape Drives
For tape gateways, the default block size for tape drives is 64 KB. However, you can increase the block size up to 1MB to improve I/O performance.
The block size you choose depends on the maximum block size supported by your backup software. It is recommended that the size of the backup software tape drive block be set to the largest possible size. However, this cannot exceed the maximum 1MB supported by Storage Gateway.
Using VMware vSphere High Availability with AWS Storage Gateway
If you run VMware vSphere on your on-premises data center, you can use AWS Storage Gateway’s VMware integration to enable high availability. VMware vSphere can provide a series of application-level health checks via vSphere High Availability (VMware HA). This approach helps protect storage workloads from hardware, hypervisor, or network failures. It also helps avoid connection timeouts and software errors like file share unavailability.
With this integration, gateways deployed in your local VMware environment or VMware Cloud on AWS can automatically recover from most service outages. Usually this is done within 60 seconds and no data is lost.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS Migration and Hybrid Storage
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 supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP utilizes NetApp SnapMirror® technology, to migrate, replicate, and synchronize data between on-premise and AWS.
NetApp’s Cloud Manager and Cloud Volumes ONTAP lets you access and manage data seamlessly across hybrid environments. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you don’t need to worry about the physical placement of data. It can be made accessible anywhere in the hybrid architecture per application requirements.
