Hosting its inaugural Storage Day in the run-up to its annual re:Invent cloud computing conference in early December, Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced a number of updates to its portfolio of storage services.

Fast Snapshot Restore in Amazon EBS

Top of the list is the new Fast Snapshot Restore feature in Amazon Elastic Block Store. Amazon EBS is a cloud-based block storage system for persistent data that provides highly available block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances.

With Amazon EBS, it’s possible to build different types of persistent storage volumes in order to strike the correct balance between performance and cost, and they can also be modified at any time. That explains why Amazon also offers an EBS Snapshot feature that enables users to capture the state of any particular volume for backup and disaster recovery purposes.

The new Fast Snapshot Restore feature expands on this capability, enabling customers to create fully-initialized, full performance EBS volumes based on their snapshots with a single click.

“This performance enhancement will allow you to build AWS-based systems that are even faster and more responsive than before,” AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. “Faster boot times will speed up your VDI environments and allow your Auto Scaling Groups to come online and start processing traffic more quickly, even if you use large and/or custom AMIs.”

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

A second major update is coming to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, which is a service for Windows-based applications running in the cloud that provides full Windows file system compatibility.

Barr said Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is being enhanced in several ways. New features include Self-Managed Directories for linking Amazon FSx file systems to on-premises or in-cloud self-managed Microsoft Active Directories, and Fine-Grained File Restoration, which makes it easier to view and restore previous versions of files. On-Premises Access meanwhile gives users the option to access their file systems from on-premises using AWS Direct Connect or an AWS VPN connection.

The service gets several new “enterprise-ready” features as well, including Native Multi-AZ File Systems that span multiple AWS Availability Zones and support for Continuously Available file shares, which are optimized for use by Microsoft SQL Server. With this, users can now store active SQL Server data on a fully managed Windows file system in AWS.

Amazon’s general manager of Amazon FSx Edward Naim talked more about the FSx for Windows File Server updates in an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio:

AWS Storage Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway helps to simplify storage management and reduce costs by, for example, allowing customers to move tape backups to the cloud and providing low latency access to data in AWS for on-premises applications.

With the update, the hybrid storage service gains higher availability thanks to a number of automated “health checks” that have been introduced when running within VMware vSphere High Availability environments. Users should now be able to recover from most service interruptions within 60 seconds or less, the company said.

Asa Kalavade, general manager of hybrid and data transfer services at AWS, told theCUBE host Dave Vellante the new health checks are designed for customers that want to do additional workloads that are uninterruptible, which means that downtime simply cannot be tolerated.

“This announcement will allow customers to have a highly available Gateway, in a VMware environment,” Kalavade said. “With that, their workloads can continue running, even if one of the Gateways goes down, if they have a hardware failure, a networking event, or software error such as the file shares becoming unavailable. The Gateway automatically restarts, so the workloads remain uninterrupted.”

In addition, the service gains more enhanced metrics for monitoring purposes, plus new maintenance options and a timely performance boost.

AWS DataSync

New capabilities are coming to AWS DataSync too. AWS DataSync was launched in 2018 to help automate the process of transferring data between on-premises storage and Amazon S3 or Amazon Elastic File System. Common use cases include migration, uploading & processing operations, and backup and disaster recovery.

The main update here is a new task scheduling feature that allows users to periodically execute tasks that can detect any changes, and copy these changes from the source storage system to the destination. Tasks can be run on an hourly, daily, weekly or custom basis, Barr said.

Amazon is reducing its costs for the service as well, from four cents per gigabyte of data transferred to 1.25 cents per GB. In addition, the service is being made available in new regions including Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).

The remaining updates include a new service-level agreement for the Same-Region Replication feature for Amazon S3, as well as the availability of Amazon Elastic File System in all commercial AWS regions.

“Storage has been strategic but it’s not been the largest part of AWS’ business,” Vellante said. “It’s strategic because it houses the data and getting the data to be resident in the cloud is important because of reduced latency and then the ability to upsell other services — namely databases, machine intelligence and other valuable and profitable offerings.

Now, he said, “AWS is expanding its portfolio and will become much more competitive” with the likes of storage leaders such as NetApp Inc. “This signals AWS’ intent to grab more market share by giving customers more functional and broad storage choices.”

“When we hear all the talk about digital transformation it is often forgotten that data is at the heart of all of this, and data means storage,” added Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “Modern, efficient and cost effective ways of using, operating and managing storage are important for enterprises for both conventional and next-generation applications.”

Vellante offered more in this overview of the Storage Day:

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE