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Using the S3 File Gateway as an Enterprise SMB File Server

0

I wish to get some feedback on using the S3 file gateway as an Enterprise SMB file server. Here are some questions:

  • What production workloads are not a good fit?
  • Latency retrieving non-cached data
  • Support for DFS Namespace.
  • Migration path from a Windows File Server or NAS.
  • Does it scale (I'm talking terabytes of data split across # of shares over the century mark.)
  • Support for Shadow Copies or other end user data recovery methods.
  • Support for data deduplication
  • TCO (when compared with Amazon FSX for Windows File Servers w/o) the FSx file gateway.)

Thanks!

Topics
Storage
Tags
AWS Storage Gateway
Language
English
asked a year ago764 views
2 Answers
4
Accepted Answer

Hello,

Amazon S3 File Gateway (S3 File Gateway) is not suited to be a full enterprise NAS replacement. Instead I would look towards one of our Amazon FSx offerings, such as Amazon FSx for Windows File Server or Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.

S3 File Gateway is recommended in the following use cases, and in general is a good fit for machine or application generated data: 1/ Data Workflows - where you want to upload data from on-prem into AWS, particularly Amazon S3, where you can design event driven architectures to process data and leverage AWS compute, AI/ML and analytics.

2/ Database Backups - Store your MS SQL, Oracle, SAP, or other database backups in Amazon S3 using S3 File Gateway to translate the backup files to objects.

3/ Archive - Store your infrequently accessed data in Amazon S3 and access it using S3 File Gateway through SMB or NFS file shares. Generally, 60-80% of an on-prem enterprise NAS is cold data. If you can identify it, and store it in say, an archive share, then that is a good way to offload your cold data to cost-effective storage tiers.

S3 File Gateway scales to petabytes, however there are limitations. Particularly, with end users accessing the gateway, there are some drawbacks and we don't generally recommend these use cases for S3 File Gateway. For instance there is no support for shadow copies (end user file level restores), no data deduplication, and operations such as renaming of a top level directory with thousands or millions of items beneath it do not perform well since we are backed by object storage (this is an instant operation on a true file system).

For your TCO, I would look at FSx for Windows and FSx for ONTAP, particularly ONTAP has a tiering capability that might be of interest to you.

Regards, Ed

AWS
answered a year ago
EXPERT
reviewed a year ago
EXPERT
reviewed a year ago
  • Dan Adams
    a year ago

    Thank you for the detailed response. I currently have a FSx for Windows deployment but facing data throughput and latency challenges. I'm not too bullish on the FSx file gateway (which is no longer available for new deployments starting end of next month.) Aight. The search continues!

0

Hi Dan - what is the best way to reach you? Would like to have a discussion on something interesting. I am on the Storage Gateway service team, and the product team would like to discuss this in more detail.

AWS
answered 3 months ago

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