Amazon announces AWS Storage Gateway

I received the following email today from AWS. This is a pretty neat offering that will allow businesses to pretty much add AWS S3 cloud storage on demand. Not to mention the ability to use it for point-in-time backup snapshots. I haven't tried it yet, but I imagine this would also be a secure method of bridging the gap between on-prem and the cloud. Very cool stuff!

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We’re excited to introduce the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides a new option to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage.

The AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage for seamless integration between on-premises IT environments and AWS storage. The service supports a standard iSCSI interface, enabling you to take advantage of cloud based storage without re-architecting existing applications. The AWS Storage Gateway provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in your on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data over SSL to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The AWS Storage Gateway enables you to securely upload your data to the AWS cloud for cost-effective backup, storing point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 for future recovery. Your data in Amazon S3 is stored as Amazon EBS snapshots, which you can restore on-premises using the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads, or for disaster recovery purposes. You can create Amazon EBS volumes from the snapshots you’ve taken using the AWS Storage Gateway, and attach these volumes to your Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, your Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data to do any processing or computation.

Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125/month per activated gateway and comes with a 60 day free trial. Snapshot storage pricing starts at only $0.14 per gigabyte per month.

We are excited to share this announcement with you. You can learn more by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway page or joining our Feb 23 webinar.

Sincerely,
The AWS Storage Gateway Team

   If you use more than one of the big cloud storage providers (Free or Pay) such as:

Mezeo Amazon S3 FTP WebDav AT&T Synaptic Storage Internap XIPCloud Storage Google Docs Google Storage EMC Atmos Online Box.net KT ucloud storage Open Stack Nirvanix Peer1 CloudOne Rackspace CloudFiles Windows Azure Windows Live SkyDrive CIFS/SMB Caringo CAStor

 

You really should check out Gladinet. I have been using their free Cloud Desktop client for about a year now and it has been very handy.  Basically it allows you to map a single network drive letter on your PC and access all of your remote cloud storage just like you would access a local drive. At times the free version does seem to have some speed issues and isn't quiet as reliable as good old FTP, but it is so simple to use. The Gladinet team also offers a Pro version that I expect would perform even better. Don't take my word for it...Give it a try.

It's free:http://gladinet.com/p/download_starter_direct.htm

 

I'll be trying out their Cloud Server software soon too so check back for a review on that.

Symform 100GB Free cloud storage. Is it really Free?

Found an interesting offering from Synform today. You can have 100GB of free distibuted cloud storage if you contribute 150GB of local storage space to the cloud. Seems a little more like distibuted storage of the PtP variety to me, but there are obvious benefits to having distributed redundant storage. I need to read more to fully understand how this offering will work, but you can check it out for now: http://www.symform.com/free-cloud-storage.aspx

Amazon cloud outage derails Reddit, Quora | Deep Tech - CNET News

Is there a silver lining? One of the topics I can’t stress enough when talking to my customers about virtualization and cloud computing is the importance of infrastructure planning, monitoring, and capacity planning.  Doing more with less is great! It doesn’t matter if we are talking about an SMB virtualizing their bare metal servers, or a large company with a Public/Private cloud strategy. At the end of the day the computing is being done on some hardware, and the less hardware you have, the more mission critical it becomes.  There are plenty of strategies to mitigate the risks and achieve five 9’s that you can implement if you have control over the infrastructure.  What about this situation with Amazon? We really don’t have anything other than the SLA to fall back on… So maybe you recoup some fees, but is that enough to offset a potential business outage? Oddly, it seems as though it just might be for many EC2 customers.  Just look at the funny 404 messages coming from EC2 customers.  It would seem that they are so happy with Amazon cloud services, that they are taking it in stride.  I remember a few years back when RackSpace had a datacenter problem and everybody was freaking out! I find it really interesting that this Amazon cloud outage is being treated entirely different.  I’m not exactly sure why, but it is quite interesting isn’t it?

Amazon cloud outage derails Reddit, Quora | Deep Tech - CNET News

Turn Your Amazon Cloud Drive into Desktop-Accessible Storage - PCWorld

Finally… Thank you Gladinet. I’ve been waiting for this for a while. And there is a free version! I’m installing now and I’ll report back with my impressions.

Turn Your Amazon Cloud Drive into Desktop-Accessible Storage - PCWorld

Riverbed Technology: Riverbed Expands Breadth and Depth of Cloud Storage and Backup Solutions Ecosystem

“Whitewater simply acts as a target for an organization’s current backup software, requiring no expensive integration or complex configuration.”
Nice! This is sounds like a winner to me.  Simply point Quest vRanger at Whitewater and it handles translation and transport to public cloud.  That is a nice model.  I look forward to reading more.  Hey Riverbed… Want to send me one for review? :-)  I see that they support a wide array of Public clouds, but I don’t know if you can setup more than one cloud target at a time… One-to-many style. Still check out the article.  Seems like a painless way to add cloud backup storage capabilities to existing backup infrastructures.
Riverbed Technology: Riverbed Expands Breadth and Depth of Cloud Storage and Backup Solutions Ecosystem

VMware Takes Over Mozy Backup Service - PCWorld Business Center

 

Interesting move by VMware, moving beyond platform vendor to Saas provider. Wise to retain the Mozy employees. Looks like Parent EMC wants to keep expanding VMware’s offerings.  I wonder if will have any impact on customers or pricing models? It will be interesting to see what the next new offering will be from the combined companies.

VMware Takes Over Mozy Backup Service - PCWorld Business Center