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Matt White
Asked: 2012-11-09 07:07:38 +0800 CST

AWS Storage Gateway without the "on-premises" part?

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The use cases for the AWS Storage Gateway always seem to assume that the virtual storage gateway would be installed on-premises (i.e. local to the customer) and would then be synced to AWS. I am wondering about placing the storage gateway on EC2 instead.

My use-case is this:

I have a large amount of customer data that must be accessed via the filesystem (i.e. it cannot be simply stored in S3). A large percentage of this data is accessed very infrequently. I use a number of EBS volumes mounted to EC2 to accomplish this, and snapshot them to S3. However, the storage is expensive, and there is a single point of failure since EBS drives can only be attached to a single instance.

However, it sounds like I could install the virtual storage gateway on my EC2 server instead, and use the new Gateway-Caching feature to only keep the frequently-accessed data locally (using the free instance storage for the caching).

Additionally, I've read that iSCSI drives can be mounted on multiple servers as long as they are formatted with a cluster-aware filesystem.

My questions:

Is this a reasonable use-case for the Storage Gateway?

Can the Storage Gateway iSCSI drive really be mounted from multiple EC2 instances, eliminating the single point of failure?

amazon-ec2

3 Answers

  1. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask the question, but I have a kind of a similar situation, except, I would like to move from AWS S3 to Backblaze B2.

    I've been using AWS Storage Gateway for a while but switched to VTL Gateway feature since it fitted me better. Now I'm looking for the similar feature (Storage gateway or, better, VTL gateway) that works with B2. Can you point me out to the right direction?

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  2. AFAIR, Starwind had AWS support and recently get Backblaze support. I'm not sure about the migration plan, but you can definitely ask their engineers to help you.

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  3. Best Answer

    Looks like it's supported now, see EC2 Gateway.

    From the link:

    This section discusses how to deploy a AWS Storage Gateway-cached volumes on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). After you deploy the gateway and add local disk storage, you activate and work with the gateway just as you would for an on-premises gateway.

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