AWS Storage Gateway

More details at Werner's post<p><a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS-Storage-Gateway.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS-Storage-...</a>

I don't have a personal need for this right now, but the fact that it stores the data as EBS volumes is pretty cool. I could imagine having local servers automatically mirrored so that they could be failed over to instances on ec2. Very powerful stuff indeed.

So you are basically paying 125$+ to have S3 cached locally and get an iSCSI interface ?

This should make EMC sit up and take notice. Amazon is doing great. I would have expected dropbox to do this after icloud was released. They should atleast mimic this now.

Can someone give a brief explanation of what this service is good for?

From my brief reading of Werner's blog post, it seems that this is very similar to what Nasuni have been selling.

This is really cool. Having just done a large and complicated S3 integration into a legacy soup of 20 year old filesystem based document management kludge, this would have made life much easier (and considerably cheaper!).<p>Not only that, it solves a lot of problems such as dangerously storing backup snapshots on-site, archival and easy deployment and access to S3's CDN functionality.<p>Sold as far as I am concerned!<p>(Yes I know it's expensive, but it's cheaper than buying something in-house and employing another hairless monkey to manage it).

Sounds like a great idea. I can't wait until they release Gateway-Cached Volumes myself as it better suits my use-case.