<story><title>AWS Tape Gateway</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SCdF</author><text>Dumb question, and I&amp;#x27;m guessing this is a &amp;quot;if you don&amp;#x27;t know it&amp;#x27;s not for you&amp;quot; situation, but what is the point of a virtual tape? Isn&amp;#x27;t the point of a tape that it&amp;#x27;s not virtual? Or is this more replicating tape software apis (WINE&amp;#x2F;proton style) so you can get rid of physical tapes (because you no longer care about their physicality) without having to change your backup strategy?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shrike</author><text>The VTL was invented because, at the time (2012ish), none of the largest enterprise backup solutions had a good S3 interface and none supported Glacier. After talking with the backup software vendors (Spectrum, Tivoli, Symantec, Commvault, etc) it became clear that adding another backup target wasn&amp;#x27;t something we (AWS) could get them to prioritize, for perfectly reasonable reasons. We could (and did) apply pressure via our shared customers, even then they estimated it would take years.&lt;p&gt;The fastest way to enable large enterprise access to S3 and Glacier for backups was to meet them where they were. We did this by virtualizing a tape library.&lt;p&gt;Background: I&amp;#x27;m one of the original inventors - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;image-ppubs.uspto.gov&amp;#x2F;dirsearch-public&amp;#x2F;print&amp;#x2F;downloadPdf&amp;#x2F;10013166&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;image-ppubs.uspto.gov&amp;#x2F;dirsearch-public&amp;#x2F;print&amp;#x2F;downloa...&lt;/a&gt;. I am no longer with AWS.</text></comment>
<story><title>AWS Tape Gateway</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SCdF</author><text>Dumb question, and I&amp;#x27;m guessing this is a &amp;quot;if you don&amp;#x27;t know it&amp;#x27;s not for you&amp;quot; situation, but what is the point of a virtual tape? Isn&amp;#x27;t the point of a tape that it&amp;#x27;s not virtual? Or is this more replicating tape software apis (WINE&amp;#x2F;proton style) so you can get rid of physical tapes (because you no longer care about their physicality) without having to change your backup strategy?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thedougd</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s the latter. In a large enterprise, the backup configuration can be wildly complicated, a matrix of systems, schedules, slas, etc. Just reconfigure your backup software to use this new virtual tape device and you&amp;#x27;re on your way.</text></comment>