If you’re just beginning your journey to the cloud or are already underway, it can feel challenging to
bridge the gap between your on-premises infrastructure and cloud services. Some of your
applications may need to remain on-premises for performance or compliance reasons, or they may
simply be too complex to move completely into the cloud. While the cloud offers a large variety of
services that can help modernize your IT infrastructure, you may also be considering a
gradual transition to the cloud, while still wanting to benefit from cloud capabilities in your data
center. AWS Storage Gateway is a fast, simple way to get started with using the cloud from your
data centers, remote offices, and edge locations. Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service
that provides low latency, on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. Your file,
database, and backup applications can continue to run without changes. And, once your data is
safely and securely in AWS, it’s available for all your current and future cloud initiatives, since it
can be easily accessed and processed by many other AWS services. In this video, we’ll show you
how quick and easy it is to get started. In just minutes, you can be up and running in the cloud
using AWS Storage Gateway. Using Storage Gateway, your on-premises applications can
access data stored in the cloud via standard storage protocols, so there’s no need to change
application code. Storage Gateway works as a File Share, as a Virtual Tape Library, or as a block
storage Volume. Applications write data to the Amazon S3 File Gateway as files which are stored
in Amazon S3 as objects. Applications can also write data as files to the Amazon FSx File
Gateway which are stored in fully managed file shares in Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.
The Tape Gateway presents a Virtual Tape Library on your local network and is compatible
with all major backup software. And, the Volume Gateway attaches to your application servers as
iSCSI block storage. No matter which type of gateway you’re using, data is cached locally and
moved to the cloud with optimized data transfers. Many Storage Gateway customers begin to use
AWS by moving backups to the cloud, shifting on-premises storage to cloud-backed file shares,
and ensuring low latency access for on-premises applications to access and process cloud data.
Now, let’s show you just how easy it is to create a secure and durable file share with virtually
unlimited storage. In just a few minutes, we’ll deploy an AWS Storage Gateway into an existing
on-premises VMware vSphere environment. In this example, we'll be joining a Windows Active
Directory Domain to give authenticated users the same experience they have on-premises.
We’ll create an SMB file share on an Amazon S3 File Gateway, and mount it on a Windows client.
We’ll start by creating a Storage Gateway in the AWS management console.
We’ll navigate to Services, and under the "Storage" section, select Storage Gateway, and click on "Create Gateway".
Here we want to store files in S3, so we select "Amazon S3 File Gateway". We'll choose the VMware vSphere option
and download the VMware ESXi image. Next, we’ll log into VMware vSphere and deploy a new VM
from the OVF template provided in the Storage Gateway console. We select the file that we downloaded
and proceed with the rest of the VM deployment wizard steps. We give our gateway a name
and select a location for the virtual machine, review the template details, and configure
storage and network settings. Once deployed, we need to add a virtual hard disk to the VM
to be used as a local cache. We edit the VM’s settings, click "Add new Device", select
Hard Disk, and enter a size for the disk. For our demo, we'll enter the minimum of 150 GB.
Finally, we power on the Virtual Machine. Done. Now, back in the AWS console, we'll complete
the initial setup of the Amazon S3 File Gateway. We click ‘Next’ to continue to the next step.
Here, we select the Service endpoint type, which controls how the gateway will communicate with AWS.
We’ll select the publicly accessible endpoint type. Next, we input the local IP address of the gateway VM,
click ‘Next’, give it a gateway name, and click ‘Activate Gateway’. Once activated, we finalize the setup by
configuring the local cache disks we added to the VM earlier. Then, we ‘Configure logging’.
For this demo, we'll select an existing Amazon CloudWatch Log group from the dropdown.
Finally, since this is VMware, we click on ‘Verify VMWare HA’ to verify that VMware High Availability
is working as expected. Now that we’re done with the initial setup of the Amazon S3 File Gateway, we can
go ahead and create an SMB share. Each share will use an Amazon S3 bucket,
which is where the files are stored in the cloud. A share can be setup as either NFS or SMB.
For this demo, we have selected an existing S3 bucket, and we’ll simply create an SMB share by
ensuring that Server Message Block is selected. We’ll click ‘Next’, accept the default Amazon S3
storage settings, and click ‘Next’ again. Now, we'll join the Active Directory domain by entering our
domain information and clicking ‘Next’. Once the domain join has completed, we can go ahead and
review our configuration, scroll down, and click ‘Create file share’.
Now that our File Share is created, we can click on it to view its details. The console helpfully gives us an
example command we can use to connect to this file share on Windows. We’ll take note of the file share’s host
and path information. Now, to use this new file share, we'll map a new network drive on our
Windows client. As you can see, it’s just like any other SMB file share. But, because this file share
is backed by the AWS cloud, there’s virtually unlimited storage space.
Take a look: Windows Explorer says there’s nearly 8 exabytes of free space on this share! And, the
Amazon S3 File Gateway handles encryption and optimizes data transfer between the gateway and the cloud for us
That’s all there is to it! In this example, we deployed to an on-premises VMware environment, but other deployment
options are available. These include Microsoft Hyper-V, Linux KVM, natively in Amazon EC2, and
as a standalone hardware appliance in your data center. We've shown the Amazon S3 File Gateway type
of AWS Storage Gateway. However, AWS Storage Gateway is also a great option for providing your on-premises
applications with low latency and efficient access to in-cloud Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file shares
with Amazon FSx File Gateway, for seamlessly moving your tape backups to the cloud with Tape Gateway, and for
presenting cloud backed iSCSI block volumes to your servers with Volume Gateway.
It has never been easier to move to the cloud, and AWS Storage Gateway is a fast and powerful way to get started.
To learn more about each Storage Gateway type and to see how customers just like you are leveraging secure,
durable, and virtually unlimited cloud storage, visit the Storage Gateway website at aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/
Thanks for watching!