MoSMB Cloud Storage Gateway – Use Cases

MoSMB Cloud Storage Gateway is a virtual server that enables your on-premises applications to securely and seamlessly access S3-compatible storage in the cloud using SMB file-based interfaces.

CIOs are looking for ways to reduce their physical data center infrastructure. A common strategy is to employ data tiering, that is, move secondary or tertiary data, such as seldom-used and long-term retention data, to the cloud. Additionally, CIOs want to take advantage of the scalability and elasticity of cloud architectures to access and use their data in flexible and autonomic ways.

MoSMB Storage Gateway can provide low-latency SMB access to S3 objects from on-premises applications. This enables hybrid IT architectures in use cases such as tiered file storage, archiving and backup to any cloud.

The following scenarios demonstrate how MoSMB Storage Gateway can be used in both cloud tiering and backup architectures.

Cloud Tiering

In on-premise environments where storage resources are stretched, migrating colder data to Public clouds can extend the life span of existing on-premise storage and reduce the need for CAPEX on additional storage hardware and data center resources.

When you add MoSMB Storage Gateway to an existing  data center, on-premises applications can take advantage of cloud S3 storage cost benefits, while ensuring low-latency access to frequently accessed data over SMB.

You can tier data using either native OS tools or third-party tools that have SMB integration.

 

Hybrid Cloud Backup

MoSMB Storage Gateway provides a low-latency SMB share using local NAS box. This makes it an ideal hybrid target for backup solutions that can use SMB. By using a mixture of local NAS, on-premise cloud like Minio, on-cloud storage like Amazon S3 Standard, and Amazon Glacier, you can store data on zero cost, tier to low-cost, highly durable cloud storage and tier it to progressively lower cost storage as the likelihood of restoration diminishes.

Example: Let us assume that backups have to be retained for one year. After 1 month, the likelihood of restoration becomes infrequent, and after 2 months it becomes extremely rare.

As an illustration, in this solution, Minio is used as the initial location for backups for the first month. The backup software or scripts write backups to the SMB share, preferably in the form of multi-megabyte size files or larger. After another month, the backups are transitioned to Amazon Glacier. Here they are held until a full year has passed since they were first created, at which point they are deleted.

As an illustration, in this solution, Minio is used as the initial location for backups for the first 30 days. The backup software or scripts write backups to the SMB share, preferably in the form of multi-megabyte size files or larger. After another 30 days, the backups are transitioned to Amazon Glacier. Here they are held until a full year has passed since they were first created, at which point they are deleted.

Cloud Migration

MoSMB File Gateway can be connected to multiple clouds concurrently. The SMB shares can be configured to map to S3 buckets hosted by various clouds. The SMB clients can map these shares on different drives and drag-and-drop files or objects from one share to the other i.e. migrate all objects from one cloud to the other.