Amazon last week announced that it added support for running its Storage Gateway on top of Microsoft Hyper-V. Amazon already supported running the Storage Gateway on top of a VMware ESXi VM. The Storage Gateway is a virtual appliance which makes Amazon S3 storage available to an on-premise environment.
The Storage Gateway keeps copies of recently accessed files on-premises, while other files are moved to Amazon S3 storage. The AWS storage gateway allows you to create two types of Storage volumes. The Gateway-Cached Volumes, which stores primary data in S3 and retains frequently accessed data locally and the Gateway-Stored Volumes, which stores all data locally with an asynchronous backup to S3. More information about how to configure the storage gateway can be found here.
With this added support for Hyper-V, Amazon now competes against Microsoft which acquired StorSimple in October last year offering a similar solution also supporting Amazon S3 but also Windows Azure.