Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Understanding Storage Gateway Resources and Resource IDs

In Storage Gateway, the primary resource is a gateway but other resource types include: volume, virtual tape, iSCSI target, and vtl device. These are referred to as subresources and they don't exist unless they are associated with a gateway.

These resources and subresources have unique Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) associated with them as shown in the following table.

Storage Gateway also supports the use of EC2 instances and EBS volumes and snapshots. These resources are Amazon EC2 resources that are used in Storage Gateway.

Working with Resource IDs

When you create a resource, Storage Gateway assigns the resource a unique resource ID. This resource ID is part of the resource ARN. A resource ID takes the form of a resource identifier, followed by a hyphen, and a unique combination of eight letters and numbers. For example, a gateway ID is of the form sgw-12A3456B where sgw is the resource identifier for gateways.

For virtual tapes, you can prepend a up to a four character prefix to the barcode ID to help you organize your tapes.