Cloud Storage Gateway
A Cloud Storage Gateway is a hardware- or software-based appliance located on the customer premises that serves as a bridge between local applications and remote cloud-based storage.
A Cloud Storage Gateway is a network appliance or server which resides at the customer premises and translates cloud storage APIs such as SOAP or REST to block-based storage protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel or file-based interfaces such as NFS or CIFS.
According to a 2011 report by Gartner Group, Cloud Storage Gateways were expected to increase the use of Cloud Storage by lowering monthly charges and eliminating the concern of data security.
A Cloud Storage Gateway appliance provides basic protocol translation and simple connectivity to allow the incompatible technologies to communicate transparently. The gateway may be a stand-alone computing device or a virtual machine (VM) image.
As the market has evolved, some vendors have dropped the word "gateway" in favor of the word "controller" to emphasize the idea that their gateway products do more than just serve as a bridge.
Unlike the Cloud Storage Services which they complement, Cloud Storage Gateway use standard network protocols which integrate with existing applications. Cloud Storage Gateway can also serve as intermediaries to multiple cloud storage providers. Some Cloud Storage Gateway also include additional storage features such as backup and recovery, caching, compression, encryption, storage de-duplication and provisioning.
Many of today's Cloud Storage Gateway products provide data deduplication and compression capabilities to make use of available bandwidth efficiently and move data as quickly as possible. Reducing the data footprint also lowers cost, because cloud providers charge for over-the-wire transfers as well as for storage space. Other popular features include snapshots and version control, the ability to use local storage as a cache, automated tiered storage and encryption.
No comments:
Post a Comment