AWS Direct Connect vs AWS Storage Gateway

Overview

AWS Storage Gateway

Stacks17

Followers59

Votes0

AWS Direct Connect

Stacks39

Followers61

Votes0

AWS Direct Connect vs AWS Storage Gateway: What are the differences?

AWS Direct Connect vs AWS Storage Gateway

AWS Direct Connect and AWS Storage Gateway are two services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that cater to different aspects of data storage and connectivity needs. While both services aim to improve the efficiency and reliability of data transfer, they have distinct features that set them apart.

Connectivity vs Storage: The main difference between AWS Direct Connect and AWS Storage Gateway lies in their primary purpose. AWS Direct Connect focuses on providing a dedicated network connection between an on-premises data center and AWS, enabling organizations to establish a private and low-latency link for data transfer. On the other hand, AWS Storage Gateway primarily deals with storage-related tasks, acting as a bridge between on-premises applications and AWS cloud storage services.
Data Transfer Modes: AWS Direct Connect supports two data transfer modes: dedicated connections and hosted connections. Dedicated connections offer private network connectivity with high bandwidth and consistent throughput, while hosted connections provide a more flexible and cost-effective option with shared bandwidth. In contrast, AWS Storage Gateway employs various transfer modes like file, volume, and tape gateways to cater to different storage and backup requirements, offering a range of functionalities such as file sharing, block volume access, and virtual tape library integration.
Data Storage Location: When it comes to data storage, AWS Direct Connect does not directly handle storage but serves as a dedicated link to transfer data between on-premises and AWS. In contrast, AWS Storage Gateway acts as a local caching layer, allowing organizations to store and access frequently used data on-premises while seamlessly moving less frequently accessed data to AWS cloud storage. This hybrid approach provides a balance between low-latency access and cost-effective scalability.
Data Latency and Bandwidth: AWS Direct Connect ensures low-latency and consistent network connections by bypassing the public internet and directly connecting to AWS regions. It offers high bandwidth options ranging from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps and can accommodate large data transfers without worrying about internet congestion. On the other hand, AWS Storage Gateway's data transfer speeds depend on the available network bandwidth and latency between the on-premises location and the AWS region. While it provides decent performance, it might not match the dedicated and predictable network speeds of AWS Direct Connect.
Data Security and Compliance: AWS Direct Connect helps enhance data security by offering a private, dedicated, and isolated connection that bypasses the public internet. It can be configured with encryption protocols like IPSec VPN and AWS Direct Connect virtual interfaces supporting either AWS Direct Connect Dedicated Connections or AWS Direct Connect Hosted Connections. AWS Storage Gateway also provides security features such as encryption at rest and in transit, data integrity checks, and integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control to ensure compliance and protection of stored data.
Cost and Pricing Model: AWS Direct Connect has a separate pricing structure based on the number of ports, location, and data transfer volume. It offers cost-saving possibilities by reducing data transfer costs over long durations. In contrast, AWS Storage Gateway's pricing combines elements of data transfer, storage usage, and additional features like caching and virtual tape libraries. The costs are calculated based on factors like gateway type, data transfer volume, and storage usage, providing flexibility in adjusting to storage requirements and usage patterns.

In summary, AWS Direct Connect focuses on providing dedicated network connectivity between on-premises data centers and AWS, ensuring low-latency, high-bandwidth data transfer. AWS Storage Gateway, on the other hand, acts as a storage bridge, enabling organizations to seamlessly integrate on-premises applications with AWS cloud storage services, providing a hybrid storage solution with caching and backup capabilities.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS Storage Gateway	AWS Direct Connect
The AWS Storage Gateway is a service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage. Once the AWS Storage Gateway’s software appliance is installed on a local host, you can mount Storage Gateway volumes to your on-premises application servers as iSCSI devices, enabling a wide variety of systems and applications to make use of them. Data written to these volumes is maintained on your on-premises storage hardware while being asynchronously backed up to AWS, where it is stored in Amazon Glacier or in Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots. Snapshots are encrypted to make sure that customers do not have to worry about encrypting sensitive data themselves. When customers need to retrieve data, they can restore snapshots locally, or create Amazon EBS volumes from snapshots for use with applications running in Amazon EC2. It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all of your data encrypted.	AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.
Gateway-Cached Volumes – Gateway-Cached volumes allow you to utilize Amazon S3 for your primary data, while retaining some portion of it locally in a cache for frequently accessed data.;Gateway-Stored Volumes – Gateway-Stored volumes store your primary data locally, while asynchronously backing up that data to AWS.;Data Snapshots – Gateway-Cached volumes and Gateway-Stored volumes provide the ability to create and store point-in-time snapshots of your storage volumes in Amazon S3.;Gateway-VTL – Gateway-VTL provides you with a cost-effective, scalable, and durable virtual tape infrastructure that allows you to eliminate the challenges associated with owning and operating an on-premises physical tape infrastructure.;Secure – The AWS Storage Gateway securely transfers your data to AWS over SSL and stores data encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.;Durably backed by Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier –The AWS Storage Gateway durably stores your on-premises application data by uploading it to Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier redundantly store data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier also perform regular, systematic data integrity checks and are built to be automatically self-healing.;Compatible – There is no need to re-architect your on-premises applications. Gateway-Cached volumes and Gateway-Stored volumes expose a standard iSCSI block disk device interface and Gateway-VTL presents a standard iSCSI virtual tape library interface.	Reduces Your Bandwidth Costs – If you have bandwidth-heavy workloads that you wish to run in AWS, AWS Direct Connect reduces your network costs into and out of AWS in two ways. First, by transferring data to and from AWS directly, you can reduce your bandwidth commitment to your Internet service provider. Second, all data transferred over your dedicated connection is charged at the reduced AWS Direct Connect data transfer rate rather than Internet data transfer rates.;Consistent Network Performance – Network latency over the Internet can vary given that the Internet is constantly changing how data gets from point A to B. With AWS Direct Connect, you choose the data that utilizes the dedicated connection and how that data is routed which can provide a more consistent network experience over Internet-based connections.;Compatible with all AWS Services – AWS Direct Connect is a network service, and works with all AWS services that are accessible over the Internet, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
Statistics
Stacks 17	Stacks 39
Followers 59	Followers 61
Votes 0	Votes 0

What are some alternatives to AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Direct Connect?

Amazon Glacier

In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

restic

It is a backup program that is fast, efficient and secure. It uses cryptography to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of your data.

Veeam Backup & Replication

It is industry-leading Backup & Replication software. It delivers availability for all your cloud, virtual and physical workloads. Through a simple-by-design management console, you can easily achieve fast, flexible and reliable backup, recovery and replication for all your applications and data.

Borg

It is a deduplicating backup program. It provides an efficient and secure way to backup data. The data deduplication technique used makes it suitable for daily backups since only changes are stored. The authenticated encryption technique makes it suitable for backups to not fully trusted targets.

Aviatrix

A cloud network and security architecture that enables intelligent orchestration and control as a service, without having to build yourself.

Afi

Afi.ai is the latest generation of data protection for M365, Google Workspace & Kubernetes. Clean & responsive UI, easy to use SLA-based protection settings, and 2-3x better backup/restore performance compared to legacy vendors.

RainyDay Backup

RainyDay Backup offers an easily configurable system that enables you to back up your Azure DevOps source code, Work Items and NuGet artifacts and more.

runrestic

It is a simple Python wrapper script for the Restic backup software that initiates a backup, prunes any old backups according to a retention policy, and validates backups for consistency. The script supports specifying your settings in a declarative configuration file rather than having to put them all on the command-line, and handles common errors.

Cohesity

It allows IT professionals to backup, manage and gain insights from their data, across multiple systems or cloud providers.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

It minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery.

Related Comparisons

Stacks17

Followers59

Votes0

AWS Direct Connect

Stacks39

Followers61

Votes0

AWS Direct Connect vs AWS Storage Gateway: What are the differences?

AWS Direct Connect vs AWS Storage Gateway

Connectivity vs Storage: The main difference between AWS Direct Connect and AWS Storage Gateway lies in their primary purpose. AWS Direct Connect focuses on providing a dedicated network connection between an on-premises data center and AWS, enabling organizations to establish a private and low-latency link for data transfer. On the other hand, AWS Storage Gateway primarily deals with storage-related tasks, acting as a bridge between on-premises applications and AWS cloud storage services.
Data Transfer Modes: AWS Direct Connect supports two data transfer modes: dedicated connections and hosted connections. Dedicated connections offer private network connectivity with high bandwidth and consistent throughput, while hosted connections provide a more flexible and cost-effective option with shared bandwidth. In contrast, AWS Storage Gateway employs various transfer modes like file, volume, and tape gateways to cater to different storage and backup requirements, offering a range of functionalities such as file sharing, block volume access, and virtual tape library integration.
Data Storage Location: When it comes to data storage, AWS Direct Connect does not directly handle storage but serves as a dedicated link to transfer data between on-premises and AWS. In contrast, AWS Storage Gateway acts as a local caching layer, allowing organizations to store and access frequently used data on-premises while seamlessly moving less frequently accessed data to AWS cloud storage. This hybrid approach provides a balance between low-latency access and cost-effective scalability.
Data Latency and Bandwidth: AWS Direct Connect ensures low-latency and consistent network connections by bypassing the public internet and directly connecting to AWS regions. It offers high bandwidth options ranging from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps and can accommodate large data transfers without worrying about internet congestion. On the other hand, AWS Storage Gateway's data transfer speeds depend on the available network bandwidth and latency between the on-premises location and the AWS region. While it provides decent performance, it might not match the dedicated and predictable network speeds of AWS Direct Connect.
Data Security and Compliance: AWS Direct Connect helps enhance data security by offering a private, dedicated, and isolated connection that bypasses the public internet. It can be configured with encryption protocols like IPSec VPN and AWS Direct Connect virtual interfaces supporting either AWS Direct Connect Dedicated Connections or AWS Direct Connect Hosted Connections. AWS Storage Gateway also provides security features such as encryption at rest and in transit, data integrity checks, and integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control to ensure compliance and protection of stored data.
Cost and Pricing Model: AWS Direct Connect has a separate pricing structure based on the number of ports, location, and data transfer volume. It offers cost-saving possibilities by reducing data transfer costs over long durations. In contrast, AWS Storage Gateway's pricing combines elements of data transfer, storage usage, and additional features like caching and virtual tape libraries. The costs are calculated based on factors like gateway type, data transfer volume, and storage usage, providing flexibility in adjusting to storage requirements and usage patterns.

Detailed Comparison

AWS Storage Gateway	AWS Direct Connect
The AWS Storage Gateway is a service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage. Once the AWS Storage Gateway’s software appliance is installed on a local host, you can mount Storage Gateway volumes to your on-premises application servers as iSCSI devices, enabling a wide variety of systems and applications to make use of them. Data written to these volumes is maintained on your on-premises storage hardware while being asynchronously backed up to AWS, where it is stored in Amazon Glacier or in Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots. Snapshots are encrypted to make sure that customers do not have to worry about encrypting sensitive data themselves. When customers need to retrieve data, they can restore snapshots locally, or create Amazon EBS volumes from snapshots for use with applications running in Amazon EC2. It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all of your data encrypted.	AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.
Gateway-Cached Volumes – Gateway-Cached volumes allow you to utilize Amazon S3 for your primary data, while retaining some portion of it locally in a cache for frequently accessed data.;Gateway-Stored Volumes – Gateway-Stored volumes store your primary data locally, while asynchronously backing up that data to AWS.;Data Snapshots – Gateway-Cached volumes and Gateway-Stored volumes provide the ability to create and store point-in-time snapshots of your storage volumes in Amazon S3.;Gateway-VTL – Gateway-VTL provides you with a cost-effective, scalable, and durable virtual tape infrastructure that allows you to eliminate the challenges associated with owning and operating an on-premises physical tape infrastructure.;Secure – The AWS Storage Gateway securely transfers your data to AWS over SSL and stores data encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.;Durably backed by Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier –The AWS Storage Gateway durably stores your on-premises application data by uploading it to Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier redundantly store data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier also perform regular, systematic data integrity checks and are built to be automatically self-healing.;Compatible – There is no need to re-architect your on-premises applications. Gateway-Cached volumes and Gateway-Stored volumes expose a standard iSCSI block disk device interface and Gateway-VTL presents a standard iSCSI virtual tape library interface.	Reduces Your Bandwidth Costs – If you have bandwidth-heavy workloads that you wish to run in AWS, AWS Direct Connect reduces your network costs into and out of AWS in two ways. First, by transferring data to and from AWS directly, you can reduce your bandwidth commitment to your Internet service provider. Second, all data transferred over your dedicated connection is charged at the reduced AWS Direct Connect data transfer rate rather than Internet data transfer rates.;Consistent Network Performance – Network latency over the Internet can vary given that the Internet is constantly changing how data gets from point A to B. With AWS Direct Connect, you choose the data that utilizes the dedicated connection and how that data is routed which can provide a more consistent network experience over Internet-based connections.;Compatible with all AWS Services – AWS Direct Connect is a network service, and works with all AWS services that are accessible over the Internet, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
Statistics
Stacks 17	Stacks 39
Followers 59	Followers 61
Votes 0	Votes 0

AWS Direct Connect vs AWS Storage Gateway

Overview

AWS Direct Connect vs AWS Storage Gateway: What are the differences?