The online and offline worlds are becoming increasingly linked, and Amazon wants to continue to drive that connection with the release of AWS Storage Gateway, a tool designed to connect on-premise software appliances with their corresponding cloud storage services.

This new service will make cloud products more readily accessible to people working almost exclusively with on-premises IT. Customer data centers will be backed up in AWS's S3 storage as EBS snapshots for full recovery on on-premise hardware in the future. These files will also be available as Amazon EBS volumes, "enabling you to easily mirror data between your on-premises and Amazon EC2-based applications."

"Gateways" will run in a data center and support as much as 12 volumes and 12TB of storage.

Eventually, a range of technologies will be supported by the Storage Gateway; however, the service will only use VM image for VMware ESXi 4.1 at launch.

Current AWS users will be able to test out a free trial of Storage Gateway. After that, it will run at $125 a month, with additional rates for EBS snapshot storage and outbound data transfer.

Check out the AWS blog for more information on AWS Storage Gateway, including a fun chart and video.