You may have seen Amazon’s announcement of the AWS Storage Gateway beta here, here, and here. Truth be told, the cloud storage gateway market is starting to catch fire.
Amazon’s move validates the need for an iSCSI cloud storage gateway to easily deliver cloud storage into business environments and acknowledges that integration through APIs is not a process businesses will easily embrace. The deeper implication is that gateways facilitate the adoption of cloud storage as an alternative to on-premise or off-premise traditional storage, helping Amazon tap into a large multi-billion dollar data storage market. Does this mean more cloud providers may want to offer a gateway in the future? You bet.
There’s a lot of product differentiation between AWS Gateway and existing storage gateway products like CloudArray. Caching, performance, encryption, deduplication, compression, disaster recovery, high availability, ease of use, administration, storage capacity are all points of comparison one should consider. I’m sure there will be plenty published by users comparing hands-on experiences, so I won’t dive into deeper details here beyond mentioning one fly in the ointment: the AWS Gateway supports only one cloud provider.
Whether it’s purchasing servers or storage, businesses naturally prefer to have choices. And our cloud storage experience has been similar with customers preferring to have the flexibility to choose from a broad array of cloud providers including Amazon, AT&T, Nirvanix, Rackspace, HP Cloud and PEER1 to name a few. Additionally, we are seeing increased interest in private clouds like OpenStack, EMC Atmos, Mezeo, Nirvanix, Scality and some businesses are even using existing storage as a starting point. If you plan to use multiple providers, are considering private cloud or at least want the flexibility to keep those options open in the future, a multi-provider gateway is a better solution.
Bottom line? Amazon’s announcement further positions cloud storage as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise and off-premise solutions. It presents one more way for businesses to easily connect to Amazon cloud storage and having more gateway choices is always a win for the customer. For customers seeking a robust, enterprise-class feature set and the industry’s broadest choice of public and private cloud providers, solutions like CloudArray continue to be the best option.
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