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USDA – Cloud Storage and Archival Services

Summary

US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) provides economic research services for agriculture, food, the environment related issues. Scientists use high-end workstations to perform scientific computing requiring rapid access to large amounts of data. Given the large data storage and processing requirements to perform statistical analytics, ERS needed a hybrid data storage solution that provided local caching with long-term storage hosted on a scalable, secure and highly cost-efficient cloud-based service. stackArmor developed a FedRAMP Moderate compliant, Hybrid storage solution with local caching of data connected to Amazon s3 using the AWS  Storage Gateway service.

Solution

AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless integration with data security features between your on-premises IT environment and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage infrastructure. AWS Storage Gateway offers file-based, volume-based and tape-based storage solutions. A local virtualized Gateway VM instance in the ERS data center acts as the local cache. Then gateway storage volumes were created and mapped to the storage area network (SAN) disks. To provide the optimal performance configuration, the data is loaded into the upload buffer in preparation for loading into Amazon S3. The gateway uploads data from the upload buffer over an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to the AWS Storage Gateway service running in the AWS Cloud. The service then stored the data encrypted in Amazon S3.

Services Leveraged in this Implementation:

– AWS Storage Gateway

– Amazon S3

– AMI

– EC2

Skills Leveraged in this Implementation:

– FedRAMP and Security expertise

– Backup and Archival expertise

– AWS Architecture expertise