Amazon Expands Cloud Service With AWS Storage Gateway

Amazon has expanded its cloud offering by launching Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway, a service which combines on-premises software and cloud-based storage for cost effective backup and rapid recovery.

In an attempt to appeal to new customers, Amazon says it has made the Storage Gateway very easy to use, claiming that there is no need to adapt or re-design any part of the system.

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The service regularly saves point-in-time snapshots of application data and then sends them to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) servers, where they are encrypted and securely stored. After the first complete upload, only the data that has changed since the last snapshot will be added.

All snapshots are also compressed, further minimising storage charges so if a data centre is crippled by a natural disaster or attacked by malware, data will remain safe. A standard iSCSI interface will work with the existing applications, while maintaining data on a user’s hardware to retain the same read/write performance.

Amazon CloudWatch helps users keep a watchful eye on the gateway storage volumes, providing information about throughput, latency, and internet bandwidth. Amazon also announced future plans to offer Gateway-cached volume support, which will ensure that nearly all data will be stored in the cloud, with only a selection of recently written or frequently accessed data stored locally.

New customers will receive 1GB of snapshot storage and a 15GB data transfer allowance across all AWS services every month, with data transfers to the Storage Gateway being completely free at all times. Amazon hopes that the comparatively low price point and ease of use will help it compete against the likes of Symantec in the cloud computing industry.