AWS Adds Support for NetApp ONTAP

One of the major announcements from this past AWS Storage Day 2021, September 2nd 2021, was Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a fully managed storage service that enables businesses to run NetApp ONTAP file systems in the AWS cloud. ONTAP from NetApp  is an enterprise data management solution designed to provide high-performance storage for use with enterprise applications like Oracle, SAP, VMware and Microsoft SQL Server.

Traditionally, ONTAP runs on a local NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.  It supports multi-protocol access including NFS, SMB and the iSCSI protocols and can scale up to 176 PiB. AWS FSx for ONTAP storage can be accessed from Linux, Windows, and macOS.

ONTAP provides sub-millisecond latencies and high levels of throughput and IOPS. It also supports a number of advanced storage management capabilities including inline data compression, deduplication, compaction, thin provisioning, replication (SnapMirror), and point-in-time cloning (FlexClone). With the new announcement, ONTAP will be running on top of Amazon FSx which is a group of managed, highly reliable and performant cloud file systems.

Amazon FSx previously supported Amazon FSx for Lustre and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. AWS FSx for NetApp ONTOP enables businesses to migrate on-premises applications that currently run on NAS appliances to the AWS cloud. It will also enable businesses to build, test, and run cloud-native ONTAP applications.

AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides two storage tiers. Intelligent tiering enables ONTAP to move data between the two tiers as-needed. The AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP tiers consist of:

  • Primary Storage — Built on high performance SSDs, the Primary Storage tier is designed to hold your data that is active and/or sensitive to latency. You can provision up to 192 TiB of storage per file system in the Primary Storage tier.
  • Capacity Pool Storage – Designed to hold data that is accessed infrequently at a lower cost, this tier can grow and shrink as needed and it can scale to pebibytes.

You can find more information at Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTA: Fully managed storage built on NetApp’s popular ONTAP file system. Pricing for AWS FSx NetApp ONTAP depends on a number of factors including: SSD Storage provisioned, SSD IOPS, Capacity Pool usage, throughput capacity and backup storage space consumed.

You can find out more details about the pricing at Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Pricing.