The AWS Storage Gateway service can be configured to act as a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) that spans from your on-premises environment, where your production applications are, to the AWS cloud's highly scalable, redundant and durable storage services, Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.

The tape gateway presents the Storage Gateway to your existing backup application as an industry-standard iSCSI-based VTL, consisting of a virtual media changer and virtual tape drives. You can continue to use your existing backup applications and workflows while writing to a collection of virtual tapes stored on massively scalable Amazon S3. When you no longer require immediate or frequent access to data contained on a virtual tape, you can have your backup application archive it from the virtual tape library into Amazon Glacier, further reducing storage costs.

Storage Gateway is compatible with many common backup applications. The VTL interface eliminates large upfront tape automation capital expenses, multi-year maintenance contract commitments and ongoing media costs. You pay only for the amount of data you write to tape, and scale as your needs grow. The need to transport storage media to offsite facilities and handle tape media manually goes away, and your archives benefit from the design and durability of the AWS cloud platform.