Amazon broadens on-premise storage features

Amazon has given datacentre administrators greater control over its on-premise AWS Storage Gateway technology via a set of APIs.

The APIs were released on Wednesday and give businesses another way to manage the cloud storage and backup technology, and some new functions, according to Amazon.

"Up until now, the AWS Storage Gateway was configurable through the AWS Management Console," Jeff Barr, a cloud computing senior manager for Amazon Web Services, wrote in a blog post. "You can now configure and manage your gateways programmatically, using the Storage Gateway APIs or the AWS SDKs for .Net, Java, or PHP."

The APIs let administrators control the management and operation of the gateways and let them alter and create schedules for taking snapshots of information. The technology can be used for reducing the gateway's bandwidth consumption, or migrating data up to the EC2 compute service for bath processing, then pulling it back down, Barr wrote.

Storage Gateway launched as a beta in January. It is designed for companies that want a hybrid cloud, where they keep part of their data on-premise and kick some information up to Amazon for disaster recovery and data migration purposes.