Smart Cloud Gateway is a solution that connects your on-premise systems with cloud-based storage. You can use the Smart Cloud Gateway to store data in Microsoft Azure Cloud, Amazon AWS, any S3 compatible cloud or any other public or private cloud and access it as if it was stored on your local storage systems.
The cloud storage gateway supports integration with most mainstream backup software such as Veeam, Acronis, Rubrik, Commvault, and more. With the Smart Cloud Gateway, you can create local S3 object storage or cloud storage repositories to store your backup data durably and cost-effectively.
The gateway solution also enables both long-term data retention for compliance and recovery directly to the cloud, locally or to secondary (or offsite) target repositories.
Before we discuss the effectiveness of the Smart cloud gateway for backup and archiving, let’s take a closer look at how the enterprise gateway works.
How Smart Cloud Gateway Works
The Smart cloud gateway connects with purpose-built backup appliances, NAS appliances, SAN storage, and HCI Hyperconverged appliances using industry standard protocols and enables you to integrate desired cloud repositories set up in Azure, Amazon S3, and other S3 compatible clouds. But that’s not all. The cloud gateway also allows users to provision backup target storage on offsite secondary appliances. And this works for archiving too.
Supported protocols include:
NAS: NFS & CIFS/SMB
SAN: iSCSI & Fibre Channel (FC)
For HCI Workloads – Supported Hypervisors: VMware, Hyper-V, KVM & Citrix (formerly XenServer)
Note: The Smart Cloud Gateway is available as a virtual gateway appliance that can be deployed as a Virtual Machine (VM) on the above mentioned hypervisors. And it’s also available as a gateway appliance with Flash Cache or SSD cloud caching support.
The process: it feels the same as local storage
Once the setup process is complete and the backup target storage are configured, the experience is the same as using local storage resources. You don’t have to deal with complex management interfaces, you don’t have to worry about data integrity issues and you can automate the process too.
With data services such as automated tiering, you can define policies and automatically move backup copies or archival data to target repositories. This makes for a very simple, efficient and hassle-free data management experience. It also frees up resources. In other words, it takes less staff to maintain so you can focus your resources on business-critical operations.
Benefits of Using Smart Cloud Gateway
Automated Tiering & Management: Management is made easy with hardware and software tiering support. As mentioned earlier, you can define policies that automatically transfer data from your local systems to designated target storage repositories. This process can be configured for auto-transfer of archival data. And it can also be used to automatically move backup copies to safer offsite repositories.
Cenntralized Management: While the cloud gateway facilitates different data types, and enables you to integrate different types of storage repositories such as cloud and offsite target repositories, the management is rather simple and centralized. You can manage all your configured resources and target storage repositories using a single management GUI that runs on standard GUI.
If you use StoneFly’s Smart Cloud Gateway, then management takes less time, it’s easy, and efficient.
Save Money – Better ROIs: Instead of purchasing more hardware and setting up additional EBODs, it’s more cost-effective to leverage public cloud repositories; especially when it comes to long term data storage. With the cloud gateway, you can store data in compliant, cost-effective, and durable cloud repositories.
Not to mention, without additional hardware, there are no maintenance costs either. Therefore, the ROIs are much better.
Backup Data Storage with Smart Cloud Gateway
You can leverage StoneFly Smart Cloud Gateway to integrate the cloud storage repository of your choice with your purpose-built backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. The cloud gateway lets you create local S3 object storage volumes that can be connected with mainstream backup software such as Veeam, Acronis, Rubrik, Commvault, Veritas, etc.
The integrated cloud storage volumes keep your data safe in the cloud while the gateway delivers you “local-like” performance in terms of backup and recovery speeds. This type of setup is great for effective data protection and it saves money.
The cloud gateway also offers a number of data services to improve your remote backup data storage experience. Here’s a brief list of said features:
- Deduplication – Reduces backup data size
- Immutable Snapshot – Secures data from ransomware, human error & other threats
- Sync & Async Replication – Enables data redundancy configuration and facilitates high availability
- Advanced Encryption – Protects data from unauthorized access
- WORM (Write-Once Read-Many) storage provisioning
- Built-in anti-ransomware, anti-malware, anti-virus
- And more!
Archiving with StoneFly Smart Cloud Gateway
Archiving is another great use-case for StoneFly Smart cloud gateway. Archival data usually consumes a huge portion of the storage capacities in enterprise data centers. This in turn increases costs, slows down processes and if you’re doing them in tape, makes things very tedious. This is one of the reasons why storage experts advise using public cloud repositories for data archiving.
StoneFly Smart cloud gateway helps you with your archival needs with a quick data migration and cost-effective retention in the cloud of your choice. Our cloud gateway can be used to provision storage in Azure, Amazon S3, and any other S3 compatible cloud and integrate provisioned storage with existing systems. These systems can be bare-metal, SAN storage appliances, NAS systems, backup & DR systems, and HCI appliances.
The above mentioned features can also play an important role in simplifying the archiving needs of your organization or business. For instance, automated tiering can help you automate the entire process. All you have to do is analyze your user behavior, determine what kind of files you want to automatically transfer to cloud storage tiers, and then let StoneFly Smart cloud gateway do the rest of the work for you.
Conclusion
Storing backup data in the cloud or moving the bulk of your archiving data to the cloud is a great idea. It reduces costs, simplifies data management and in terms of data protection delivers another layer of recoverability for mission-critical workloads. And StoneFly smart cloud gateway makes sure that your cloud integration journey is seamless, easy, and simple.
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