AWS Storage Gateway User Guide
Use a Larger Block Size for Tape Drives
Back gateway virtual disks with separate physical disks
When you provision gateway disks, we strongly recommend that you don't provision local disks
for the upload buffer and cache storage that use the same underlying physical storage disk. For
example, for VMware ESXi, the underlying physical storage resources are represented as a data store.
When you deploy the gateway VM, you choose a data store on which to store the VM files. When
you provision a virtual disk (for example, as an upload buffer), you can store the virtual disk in the
same data store as the VM or a different data store. If you have more than one data store, then we
strongly recommend that you choose one data store for each type of local storage you are creating.
A data store that is backed by only one underlying physical disk can lead to poor performance. An
example is when you use such a disk to back both the cache storage and upload buffer in a gateway
setup. Similarly, a data store that is backed by a less high-performing RAID configuration such as
RAID 1 can lead to poor performance.
Change the volumes configuration
For volumes gateways, if you find that adding more volumes to a gateway reduces the throughput
to the gateway, consider adding the volumes to a separate gateway. In particular, if a volume
is used for a high-throughput application, consider creating a separate gateway for the high-
throughput application. However, as a general rule, you should not use one gateway for all
of your high-throughput applications and another gateway for all of your low-throughput
applications. To measure your volume throughput, use the
ReadBytes
and
WriteBytes
metrics.
For more information on these metrics, see
Measuring Performance Between Your Application and
Use a Larger Block Size for Tape Drives
For a tape gateway, the default block size for a tape drive is 64 KB. However, you can increase the block
size up to 1 MB to improve I/O performance.
The block size that you choose depends on the maximum block size that your backup software supports.
We recommend that you set the block size of the tape drives in your backup software to a size that is
as large as possible. However, this block size must not be greater than the 1 MB maximum size that the
gateway supports.
Tape gateways negotiate the block size for virtual tape drives to automatically match what is set on
the backup software. When you increase the block size on the backup software, we recommend that
you also check the settings to ensure that the host initiator supports the new block size. For more
information, see the documentation for your backup software. For more information about specific
gateway performance guidance, see
.
Optimize the Performance of Virtual Tape Drives in
the Backup Software
Your backup software can back up data on up to 10 virtual tape drives on a tape gateway at the same
time. We recommend that you configure backup jobs in your backup software to use at least 4 virtual
tape drives simultaneous on the tape gateway. You can achieve better write throughput when the
backup software is backing up data to more than one virtual tape at the same time.
Add Resources to Your Application Environment
Increase the bandwidth between your application server and your gateway
To optimize gateway performance, ensure that the network bandwidth between your application
and the gateway can sustain your application needs. You can use the
ReadBytes
and
WriteBytes
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