Face it, for all the drama around Microsoft’s recent travails, it owns a good chunk of today’s enterprise. I would wager even most Google Apps shop also run Microsoft Office, for example. And then there’s the tons of corporate data living in Windows-centric IT shops– in SQL Server and SharePoint. That’s why Amazon, in its push to draw more enterprise customers, had to make sure the Amazon Storage Gateway will run in Microsoft Hyper-v virtualized shops. Which it now does. 
The news, released on the AWS blog, means the year-old storage gateway — a key bridge between in-house company data and Amazon’s cloud — already supported VMware’s popular ESXi hypervisor. As the AWS blog explains, the gateway:
” … combines a software appliance (a virtual machine image that installs in your on-premises IT environment) and Amazon S3 storage. You can use the Storage Gateway to support several different file sharing, backup, and disaster recovery use cases. For example, you can use the Storage Gateway to host your company’s home directory files in Amazon S3 while keeping copies of recently accessed files on-premises for fast access. This minimizes the need to scale your local storage infrastructure.”
If companies are to trust more of their data to a cloud — any cloud — they need to see that pumping their data in and out of it is: a) easy as pie; b) secure. That’s the reason Microsoft snapped up StorSimple last October. And that’s the idea behind such slick services as Nasuni and Panzura. Face it, it’s in Amazon’s best interest to blur the line between in-house data and data that lives in its cloud — and that’s the idea behind the storage gateway.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
- A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
- In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars
     |