This topic describes the common application scenarios of Cloud Storage Gateway (CSG).
Storage expansion and data migration
CSG is integrated with intelligent caching algorithms, which automatically distinguish between hot and cold data. This technology allows CSG to retain hot data in local cache disks to accelerate data retrieval. You can transfer a large amount of data from the cloud storage to a data center without additional configurations. This way, you can expand your storage from a data center to the cloud. The cloud also retains a full copy of data. This ensures data consistency. CSG can be used in the following scenarios:
File sharing: Files and data are shared among different computing clusters.
Data backup: Application data can be synchronized to Object Storage Service (OSS) by using CSG and backup software, such as Veeam and NBU.
Cold data archiving: Cold data is written from local devices or Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances to Infrequent Access (IA) or Archive OSS buckets by using CSG. This way, local disk space can be freed up to improve ROI of storage.
Cloud disaster recovery
As cloud computing becomes more and more widely used, an increasing number of users migrate their business to the cloud. As the business scale grows, business reliability and continuity challenges arise. CSG supports virtualization. You can integrate third-party services with Alibaba Cloud services to implement disaster recovery solutions.
Cross-region data sharing and distribution
You can deploy file gateways in multiple regions and associate the gateways with the same OSS bucket to quickly share and distribute files across regions. This feature is suitable for branch offices among which data needs to be synchronized and shared.
Compatibility with traditional applications
Some users may run both traditional and modern applications in the cloud. In this case, the traditional applications that are migrated from a data center use standard storage protocols, such as NFS, SMB, and iSCSI. In most cases, modern applications are developed based on cutting-edge technologies and support object access protocols. Data communication among applications over different protocols requires complicated operations. CSG allows you to establish communications among applications over different protocols and enables data exchange between traditional applications and modern applications.
An alternative to ossfs and ossftp
ossfs and ossftp are open source tools based on file protocols. You can use ossfs and ossftp to directly upload files to OSS. However, ossfs and ossftp are not supported in the production environment due to their low compatibility with the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX). Additional configurations and cache disks are required to use ossfs and ossftp to mount buckets to a client. In scenarios where you need to use ossfs and ossftp to mount buckets to multiple clients, the configuration process may be complicated and time-consuming.
CSG is an excellent alternative to ossfs and ossftp. To accelerate access to data that is stored in OSS, you only need to create a file gateway, and mount an NFS share on your local client or map a Windows SMB share to a network drive. Then, you can manage data in the remote OSS bucket in the same way that you manage data in a local file system.
