AWS Storage Gateway (opens in new tab)

Not since the last snapshot. It syncs as close to real-time as possible without the latency and network speeds affecting the performance locally.

This solution isn't designed to replace fault-tolerance on local hardware. It is for close to realtime offsite replication and backup.

Data in S3 is stored in at least three geographically separate locations and snapshots are very fast and very efficient on storage space.

The final major advantage you get through a solution such as this is that if you do have your primary site go down (floods, tornados, etc), you can bring up all your existing images via EC2 without having to have a bunch of redundant hardware sitting around waiting for disaster to strike.

And what do you pay for this? $125/month plus a per GB storage cost CHEAPER than enterprise storage generally is.

If I read it correctly, the server can fail but because the data is stored via iSCSI, it will not actually be lost (unless it is the appliance itself that fails)

As far as I understood the product page and Werner Vogels' blog post[1] it does not run on file level, but on filesystem level. So you won't be able to access single files from within S3, but rather have whole disk images stored in Amazon S3, ready to be restored back to your local datacenter or to be mounted on EC2 servers.

1: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS-Storage-...

Except you can use it to power on EC2 machines with those data, so you can use it for dealing with requests spikes, for offsite data elaboration or even Disaster Recovery of your onpremises infrastructure on Amazon.

I'm not sure if that's what kondro meant but what I would like to see is a virtually unlimited size ("elastic") volume where the local disk acts only as the cache.

This would make a wide range of big-storage use-cases ridiculously trivial - those where only ~10% of the data-set is frequently accessed.

I.e. one could lazily scale the expensive local storage with throughput-demand, while the S3 backing store takes care of the long-tail (which can easily be many terabytes long when you're dealing with media files).