#cloudgateway

Ubiquiti’s Enterprise Cloud Gateway delivers high-performance, scalable networking for large enterprises—supporting 500+ devices, 5,000 clients, advanced security, AI-powered monitoring, and seamless connectivity with robust, redundant infrastructure.

It’s no surprise the biggest hindrance to cloud storage adoption is the lack of standards. Cloud storage provider’s talk via REST and SOAP API interfaces. Your data, however, is accessed via data center protocols, ie FC, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, FCoE. Bringing the two together is as foggy as the Scottish lochs. Ideally to leverage the power of cloud storage, your ingest point has to be in one of three ways.

Specialized code that can talk to the cloud providers via these REST/SOAP APIs

Application integration  via platforms such as VMware vFabric (based on spring)

And/or Cloud Gateways

Cloud gateways, seem to be the least impacting of all these ingest points..

So what is a Cloud Gateway?

Simply put it’s an appliance (physical commodity hardware) OR a virtual construct that consumes data on the front end using standard Ethernet interfaces/DC protocols and moves it to a cloud storage provider on the backend via Cloud APIs. Cloud gateways operate similarly to Storage Arrays and funny enough offer up some compelling features such as…

Snapshots

Deduplication

Data encryption

Thin provisioning

Data compression

Housed within the appliance are caching mechanisms as well as local storage (SAS or EFD’s typically, in the TB range for best of breed solutions) that ease and quicken the retrieval of hot data.  However cold data that meets specific policies is tiered to a cloud provider of your choice. Those policies could include, last access time, last modify time, number of snapshots, etc.