Amazon has made a bunch of storage announcements that herald next week’s re:invent, the company’s annual customer conference.
AWS Technical Evangelist Jeff Barr has detailed the updates in this blog. Here is our summary.
Elastic Block Store (EBS) has gained a Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) feature to create fully-initialised, full-performance EBS volumes.
FSx for Windows File Server now includes remote management, native multi-AZ file systems, user quotas, data deduplication and support for smaller SSD file systems.
Elastic File System (EFS) is available in all commercial AWS regions.
DataSync has become available in all commercial and GovCloud regions. It supports Automated and Accelerated Data Transfer, and can be used for migration, upload and process operations, and backup/DR. This month Amazon has dropped per-GB prices from $0.04/GB to $0.0125/GB.
It gets a task scheduling feature to periodically execute a task that detects changes and copies them from the source storage system to the destination, on an hourly, daily, weekly, or custom basis.
Simple Storage Service (S3) added Same-Region Replication (SRR) in mid-September, giving users the ability to configure in-region replication based on bucket, prefix, or object tag. Now it gets a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Replication, with the ability to monitor the status of each replication configuration.
Storage Gateway
- The hybrid cloud Storage Gateway service can be health-checked when running in a VMware vSphere High Availability environment; being integrated with VMware’s VM heartbeat. It can recover in less than 60 seconds from many service outages, with sessions maintained and apps unaffected after a pause.
- With Amazon CloudWatch Integration enabled, Storage Gateway sends cache utilisation, access pattern, throughput, and I/O metrics to CloudWatch, where they’re visible in the Monitoring tab.
- Users now have more control over software updates timing. Mandatory security updates to Storage Gateway occur promptly, but users the feature update schedule can be controlled, with options for day of the week and month, with more options coming.
- The Storage Gateway has higher read performance when used as a Virtual Tape Library, and for reading data and listing directories when used as a File Gateway.
On a final note, Snowball Edge gets three training videos.
All of the new features are available now.
