Amazon Storage Gateway for Hyper-V

In an interesting turn of events recently, Amazon made a bold statement to expand its footprint by releasing the Amazon Storage Gateway for Hyper-V. The AWS storage gateway is a cloud gateway resides on premise as a virtual appliance. The gateway exposes local storage as an iSCSI target such that all end points that require storing data in the cloud can connect to the gateway’s iSCSI luns and copy data locally. The gateway then synchronizes that data to the high redundant AWS cloud. AWS storage gateway was originally released only for the VMware platform, until recently when it announced support for deploying the gateway as a virtual appliance on a Hyper-V host.

There are a few things that get highlighted based on this move from Amazon:

1. VMware may still be the market leader, but Hyper-V has the greatest momentum when it comes to on-premise virtualization adoption.
2. Microsoft has Azure as its cloud platform. However, Amazon wants to ensure that even if Hyper-V is adopted on premise, its cloud storage is leveraged as inexpensive long term storage.
3. Heterogeneity is highly prevalent in the enterprise market – be it physical / virtual infrastructure, be it multiple hypervisors in a virtual only infrastructure or be it cloud vendors.
4. Amazon’s choice of deployment is a virtual appliance, which highlights the fact that packaging a product as a virtual appliance instead of a pure software deployment significantly reduces the TCO associated with the product since the customer does not have to worry about putting all the dependent hardware and software pieces together.
5. The cloud is a great medium for long term retention.

At Unitrends, heterogeneity and ease of use with a focus on TCO (Total cost of ownership) is at the heart of our data protection offering.  We are aware that in the mid-market long term retention of data is an important pillar of many of our customer’s disaster recovery plans. Our flexible D2D2x architecture which allows our customers to archive to disks, tapes, SANs, NASs and cloud help them achieve those long term retention goals. Amazon’s recent announcement means that many of our customers have more choices on where they want their long term data to reside and Unitrends is right there to support their decision.