Optimizing Gateway Performance

To optimize gateway performance, you can add high-performance disks such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and a NVMe controller. You can also attach virtual disks to your VM directly from a storage area network (SAN) instead of the Microsoft Hyper-V NTFS. Improved disk performance generally results in better throughput and more input/output operations per second (IOPS). For information about adding disks, see Configuring additional cache storage.

To measure throughput, use the ReadBytes and WriteBytes metrics with the Samples Amazon CloudWatch statistic. For example, the Samples statistic of the ReadBytes metric over a sample period of 5 minutes divided by 300 seconds gives you the IOPS. As a general rule, when you review these metrics for a gateway, look for low throughput and low IOPS trends to indicate disk-related bottlenecks.

The minimum requirement for a gateway host server is four virtual processors. To optimize gateway performance, confirm that the four virtual processors that are assigned to the gateway VM are backed by four cores. In addition, confirm that you are not oversubscribing the CPUs of the host server.

When you add additional CPUs to your gateway host server, you increase the processing capability of the gateway. Doing this allows your gateway to deal with, in parallel, both storing data from your application to your local storage and uploading this data to Amazon S3. Additional CPUs also help ensure that your gateway gets enough CPU resources when the host is shared with other VMs. Providing enough CPU resources has the general effect of improving throughput.

Storage Gateway supports using 24 CPUs in your gateway host server. You can use 24 CPUs to significantly improve the performance of your gateway. We recommend the following gateway configuration for your gateway host server:

When you provision gateway disks, we strongly recommend that you don't provision local disks for local 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.

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 metrics of the gateway to measure the total data throughput.

For your application, compare the measured throughput with the desired throughput. If the measured throughput is less than the desired throughput, then increasing the bandwidth between your application and gateway can improve performance if the network is the bottleneck. Similarly, you can increase the bandwidth between your VM and your local disks, if they're not direct-attached.

If your application can use additional CPU resources, then adding more CPUs can help your application to scale its I/O load.