AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 565

A company has 5 PB of archived data on physical tapes. The company needs to preserve the data on the tapes for another 10 years for compliance purposes. The company wants to migrate to AWS in the next 6 months. The data center that stores the tapes has a 1 Gbps uplink internet connectivity.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Read the data from the tapes on premises. Stage the data in a local NFS storage. Use AWS DataSync to migrate the data to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval.
• B. Use an on-premises backup application to read the data from the tapes and to write directly to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
• C. Order multiple AWS Snowball devices that have Tape Gateway. Copy the physical tapes to virtual tapes in Snowball. Ship the Snowball devices to AWS. Create a lifecycle policy to move the tapes to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
• D. Configure an on-premises Tape Gateway. Create virtual tapes in the AWS Cloud. Use backup software to copy the physical tape to the virtual tape.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Migrating 5 PB of data over a 1 Gbps connection would take well over a year under ideal conditions, making online transfer methods in options A, B, and D impossible to complete within the 6-month requirement. Using AWS Snowball Edge devices with Tape Gateway allows the physical tape data to be copied and shipped offline, easily meeting the 6-month migration goal. Once the data is in AWS, transitioning it to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides the most cost-effective storage for the 10-year retention period.