The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering moving thousands of rolls of tape to the cloud.

In a pre-solicitation notice, the US government's largest transport agency said that it had "27,000+ LTO2 media backup tapes" that it was looking to migrate to Amazon Web Services.

The tapes are currently held in an undisclosed third-party "vaulted storage in the [Washington] DC metropolitan area," within an IBM 4560 Series SDLT/LTO Modular SLX Tape Library.

The agency previously held a solicitation with data center companies for storing the tape from 06/01/2021 to 05/31/2022, with a guarantee of easy and fast access to data. This is necessary for "among other things, existing or reasonably anticipated future litigation."

It is not clear if the FAA plans to keep the tapes in the data center, in addition to its digitization efforts.

The agency said that it is currently evaluating two potential alternatives: "Migration of the media tapes to FAA AWS (Amazon) Cloud," and "migration of media tapes to digital media and provide to FAA."

Across two government notices, the FAA is seeking sources to "help determine the proper acquisition strategy for this requirement," and is "seeking industry capability statements and Rough Order Magnitudes."

Companies have until November 29 to reply.