AWS File Gateway - Hybrid cloud storage
The Customer Challenge
Billabong had an existing investment in traditional on-premise storage which had become increasingly impractical and costly to maintain. Billabong was facing issues with storage systems nearing capacity due to substantial growth of their file share data.
It became unfeasible to continue adding expensive hardware to keep up with the increasing quantity of design and marketing content continually being created. Billabong needed assistance and sought out an Amazon Web Services partner to deliver the solution to their storage, backup and recovery needs.
The Approach
TechConnect IT Solutions, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, provided an onsite customer-centric approach to identify and assess Billabong’s business requirements. This enabled TechConnect to provide holistic architectural solutions in line with the AWS Well Architected Framework (WAF).
TechConnect recommended the use of AWS Storage Gateway alongside the current Windows Distributed File System (DFS), as this versatile solution can be used to connect on-premises applications to AWS storage services using standard inexpensive cloud storage. AWS Storage Gateway enables hybrid cloud storage solutions for backup and disaster recovery, file sharing, in-cloud processing and migration.
The Outcomes
Through adopting a well architected storage solution, Billabong were able to eliminate the endless and complex cycle of needing to build on-premises infrastructure to cope with business data growth and demand. By implementing a hybrid storage service that enabled seamless integration into their current on-premises environment, they were able to reduce costs, free up resources and increase their operational capabilities.
Unfortunately, due to a unique request to keep all symbolic links in the current location to reduce support calls, this resulted in an unsupported solution that required manual scripting. The best outcome was to educate users and move all files to the new AWS Storage Gateway which automatically handles custom caching and syncing to S3 in AWS.
