Drobo How-To Guide
Cloud Storage Using Amazon Storage Gateway with Drobo iSCSI SAN
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Gateway uses an on-premises virtual appliance to replicate
a portion of your local Drobo iSCSI SAN (Drobo B1200i, left below, and Drobo B800i, right below) to cloud-
based storage. This solution provides an option for redundant backup and disaster recovery in the cloud for
critical data, particularly for users that may not have a secondary site with IT equipment.
The AWS Storage Gateway is installed on a VMware host that is linked to an AWS account—providing an
on-ramp to cloud storage. Volumes of up to 1TB in size (12 volumes per gateway maximum) are created and
mounted by on-premises servers as iSCSI devices. Based on functionality available in the Beta version of
AWS Storage Gateway, data written to your gateway-stored volumes is recorded on Drobo storage and
asynchronously stored in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) in the form of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block
Store) snapshots.
This guide provides the tested steps to sync data on Drobo iSCSI storage to the cloud for offsite backup
using gateway-stored volumes. The information in this guide can be the foundation for leveraging other
Amazon Web Services (AWS) for recovery in the cloud. For example, Amazon Route 53 service enables DNS
updating so that users are pointed to the instance running in the cloud. It is also possible to create an
Amazon EBS instance from an S3 backup, mount it with an Amazon EC2 instance, and restart the
application completely from the cloud.
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