Posted On: Nov 30, 2021
Today, AWS Snow Family launches a secure, offline tape data migration capability for AWS Snowball Edge, enabling you to migrate petabytes of data stored on physical tapes to AWS without changing your existing tape-based backup workflows. Using this capability, you can migrate tape data to AWS from environments, where you have network connectivity limitations, bandwidth constraints, and high network connection costs. Moving tape data to AWS helps you eliminate physical tape infrastructure expenses and gain online access to your tape data.
The Snow Family tape data migration capability uses Tape Gateway’s Virtual Tape Library (VTL) capabilities on Snowball Edge Storage Optimized to deliver you a simple, integrated experience for tape data migration. From Snow device ordering, setup and use at your site, to ingesting, storing, and accessing tape data in AWS is easier. AWS partners can use the Snowball Edge in their facilities, or at their customers’ sites to copy data from physical tapes to a VTL, without needing to restore tape data to its original form. Once your tape data is stored in AWS, you can restrict data access and enforce retention policies as you do with offsite storage of physical tapes. You can access your tape data stored in AWS through a Tape Gateway running in AWS or in your data center over the network.
You can complete your tape data migration using Snowball Edge in three simple steps. First, order Snowball Edge from the AWS Snow Family management console. After you receive and setup the Snowball Edge device, you unlock it, and activate Tape Gateway. You can use Tape Gateway on Snowball Edge in place of a physical tape library without any changes to your current tape-based workflows. Second, you create virtual tapes on Tape Gateway and copy data from physical tapes to virtual tapes on Snowball Edge using your existing backup application. Third, after completing the data copy, you use the integrated logistics built into Snowball Edge to ship the device to the correct AWS location. AWS imports your data stored on Snowball Edge to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive based on the storage destination you selected when creating virtual tapes. You can view and manage your virtual tapes stored in AWS from the AWS Storage Gateway management console.
The Snowball Edge tape data migration capability is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. To learn more, visit the product page, documentation, and AWS News launch blog. To get started, visit the AWS Snow Family console.