Amazon Web Services wants enterprises to move their data storage to the cloud, replacing on-premise file servers, SANs and backup solutions with cloud-based storage. Today at the AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas, the company announced that the AWS Storage Gateway service now provides support for a virtual on-premises file server. At the same time, pricing for the service was lowered and simplified.
Previously customers using the AWS Storage Gateway could access data stored in their S3 buckets by connecting as a local disk via an iSCSI interface or by accessing a Virtual Tape Library. Now AWS provides a file server gateway to access the service.
The file gateway is available for download as a virtual machine image. Once that virtual machine is deployed locally in a data center, it can be configured to access S3 buckets in the AWS cloud. Those buckets will be available locally as Network File System (NFS) mount points, enabling local applications to access the cloud storage as if it were a typical network file share.
The new gateway also caches data for local performance, and data can be protected using versioning and cross-region replication in S3.
Following the storage price reduction that AWS announced earlier in November, the cloud provider is also chopping prices for the AWS Storage Gateway. Storage prices will be reduced by up to 28% for volumes and virtual tapes and up to 43% for archived virtual tapes. They are replacing the monthly gateway fee with usage-based pricing, and retrieval of archived virtual tapes will be charged on a simpler per GB basis.
