OCI Storage Gateway Alternative: A Guide to High-Performance Cloud Storage with Resilio Platform

Why Are Companies Replacing OCI Storage Gateways?

With the end-of-life (EOL) and end-of-distribution announcement for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Storage Gateway effective February 28th, 2024, many businesses are searching for an alternative solution for their cloud storage needs.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Storage Gateway was a service that essentially expanded customers’ on-premises storage to include OCI Object Storage. It allowed on-premises applications to interact with OCI Object Storage through standard NFS protocols without requiring application modification to uptake the REST APIs.

The Storage Gateway cache enabled data tiering by asynchronously moving colder, tier-2 data to the cloud while keeping it readily accessible. This service connected Storage Gateway file systems to OCI Object Storage buckets, providing a seamless bridge between on-premises storage systems and Oracle’s cloud storage. However, with the recent end-of-life announcement for OCI Storage Gateway, businesses are exploring alternatives like Resilio Active Everywhere.

The Resilio Active Everywhere Alternative

Formerly known as Resilio Connect, Resilio Active Everywhere is a software-based file replication and synchronization platform. It can be a cloud storage gateway for files stored on the edge, on-premises, and in the cloud. It works with any S3-compatible cloud, including OCI, providing a unified interface to manage file storage and access across multiple cloud storage providers.

Resilio is an agent-based solution. To replace the OCI Storage Gateway, you would install and run a Resilio agent on a system in the cloud, which could be either a Linux or Windows system. This system, equipped with the Resilio agent, would interact with your storage buckets using OCI’s storage APIs.

Other agents on other systems act as gateways by connecting to the aforementioned cloud-based agent and interacting with the storage bucket as a local file system. These systems are located remotely, on-premises, or in your data center. They can also be in other clouds (OCI or another) or within the same cloud region. There are no limits on the number of agents, location, or operating system.

Caching: Improved Performance and Lower Costs

Resilio caching gateways optimize data access and reduce egress costs. They work by pre-caching specific files or objects based on defined policies and making all other files/objects available on demand. This approach means frequently accessed or important files can be stored locally on the gateway, allowing faster access and reduced latency.

This combination of pre-caching and on-demand fetching makes Resilio a highly efficient and flexible solution for accessing OCI object storage data. It ensures that data is always available when needed while keeping egress costs to a minimum.

Performance Improvement

This caching mechanism improves performance by reducing the need to fetch data from the cloud storage repeatedly. It’s especially beneficial when dealing with frequently accessed files or environments with high latency or limited bandwidth. The cache serves as a buffer, providing quick access to data and ensuring smooth operation even in challenging network conditions.

Data transfer between the caching gateways and the cloud is WAN-optimized. Resilio uses UDP-based transfer protocol, differential sync, and compression to optimize transfer speed. Data is moved at line speed over any distance.
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Reducing Egress Costs

In terms of cost savings, every time an object/file is served from the cache instead of being fetched from the cloud, it saves on egress costs. Egress costs are the charges incurred for data transfer out of a cloud service. By minimizing the data fetched from the cloud, Resilio effectively reduces these costs.

File Caching Now Available

Active Everywhere delivers automated cache management controlled by policies in the management dashboard—unique to each caching location.

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Multi-Cloud Management

Resilio Active Everywhere offers a centralized management console with a unified view and control for all the files and objects across multiple cloud storage providers. In addition to OCI, Resilio supports Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud Storage, Wasabi Cloud Object Storage, and others.

More Than a Gateway

Resilio Active Everywhere is a platform that enables hybrid cloud and storage solutions. It provides high-performance server synchronization, remote data access, edge data ingest, hybrid work solutions, hot DR solutions, burst for compute solutions, and more.

Getting Started

Getting started with Resilio is easy with these simple steps to configure your system.

• Install the Resilio Active Everywhere management console, the centralized management and control plane for agents, files, and objects (you can instantiate it on OCI through the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.)

• Configure your storage bucket using the S3-compatible instructions in this Help Center Article.

• Install a Caching Gateway Image on OCI, enabling access to the bucket over an NFS mount.

• Configure a Resilio Active Everywhere job to connect your applications to your bucket.

• Create the job.

• Use the agent on the management console device to connect to your bucket.

• Use the Caching Gateway agent for caching.

Important notes:

• You will need a trial license for the configuration.

• Access over SMB is also possible using SAMBA or installing an agent on a Windows system.

• You can install additional caching gateways on-premises or on other clouds.

• Configuring Linux OS Cache Servers

• File Caching Jobs

Resilio Active Everywhere vs. OCI Storage Gateway

The capabilities of Resilio Active Everywhere make it an excellent alternative for businesses seeking a replacement for OCI Storage Gateway. Its flexibility, efficiency, and high-performance synchronization capabilities cater to various use cases, including hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid work, data migration, data transfer, and disaster recovery.

Take the next step to future-proofing your IT infrastructure—start a free Resilio Active Everywhere trial or schedule a demo with our specialists.
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About The Author

Ilan Shamir  /  Co-Founder

Ilan is the co-founder and CPO of Resilio, where he leads the Product and Engineering teams. Before Resilio, he was the GM of Platforms at BitTorrent and was responsible for leading a distributed organization of 120 employees at Check Point Software. Ilan has also served as a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where he focused on peer-to-peer software research.