AWS Storage Gateway User Guide
Tape Gateways
to the AWS Storage Gateway service running in the AWS Cloud. The service then stores the data
encrypted in Amazon S3.
You can take incremental backups, called
snapshots
, of your storage volumes. The gateway stores these
snapshots in Amazon S3 as Amazon EBS snapshots. When you take a new snapshot, only the data that
has changed since your last snapshot is stored. You can initiate snapshots on a scheduled or one-time
basis. When you delete a snapshot, only the data not needed for any other snapshot is removed.
You can restore an Amazon EBS snapshot to an on-premises gateway storage volume if you need to
recover a backup of your data. You can also use the snapshot as a starting point for a new Amazon EBS
volume, which you can then attach to an Amazon EC2 instance.
Tape Gateways
Tape Gateway offers a durable, cost-effective solution to archive your data in the AWS Cloud. With its
virtual tape library (VTL) interface, you use your existing tape-based backup infrastructure to store data
on virtual tape cartridges that you create on your tape gateway. Each tape gateway is preconfigured with
a media changer and tape drives. These are available to your existing client backup applications as iSCSI
devices. You add tape cartridges as you need to archive your data.
The following diagram provides an overview of tape gateway deployment.
The diagram identifies the following tape gateway components:
•
Virtual tape
– A virtual tape is like a physical tape cartridge. However, virtual tape data is stored in
the AWS Cloud. Like physical tapes, virtual tapes can be blank or can have data written on them. You
can create virtual tapes either by using the Storage Gateway console or programmatically by using the
Storage Gateway API. Each gateway can contain up to 1500 tapes or up to 1 PiB of total tape data at a
time. The size of each virtual tape, which you can configure when you create the tape, is between 100
GiB and 2.5 TiB.
API Version 2013-06-30
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