Advanced Architecting on AWS – Lab 5: Migrating an On-Premises NFS Share Using AWS DataSync and Storage Gateway (v3.5.0)

Lab overview

AnyCompany relies heavily on the use of Network File System (NFS) file shares to conduct their day-to-day business. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is concerned that the data in the on-premises NFS file server is not adequately backed up or protected from a disaster at the primary data center. The budget is tight. She would rather spend money to improve the business instead of on expensive backup or replication solutions, which will also require many staff hours to deploy and maintain. She approaches you to come up with a solution that meets the following criteria:

• Protect the data in the on-premises NFS file shares against disasters at the company data center
• Is cost-effective
• Is easy to deploy and maintain
• Can quickly migrate the existing data
• Can replicate future data off-site with minimal interaction from support teams

After extensive research, you have decided to build a proof of concept using AWS DataSync and an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway.

DataSync satisfies many of the requirements. The service:

• Copies existing data from an on-premises NFS file server to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for secure, redundant storage
• Comes with a built-in scheduling mechanism enabling you to periodically execute a data transfer task to detect and copy changes from your source storage system to the destination.
• Ensures that your data arrives intact. For each transfer, the service performs integrity checks both in-transit and at-rest. These checks ensure that the data written to your destination matches the data read from your source, validating consistency.
• Is priced per gigabyte of data moved, making it cost-effective and predictable
• Can be deployed in minutes

A Storage Gateway file gateway provides the ongoing data transfer to and from Amazon S3. The file gateway acts as a file system mount on an S3 bucket. The file gateway NFS file share will replace the existing on-premises NFS file server, allowing for that server to be retired. Doing this will free up local resources and reduce maintenance time.

Objectives

After completing this lab, you will be able to:

• Deploy and activate a DataSync agent as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance
• Create a DataSync task to copy data from a Linux-based NFS server to an S3 bucket
• Deploy and activate a Storage Gateway file gateway appliance as an EC2 instance
• Create an NFS file share on a file gateway
• Configure a Linux host to connect to an NFS share on a file gateway

Duration

This lab requires approximately 60 minutes to complete.