Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

I am enormously proud to share that AWS today announced the general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a native AWS managed service powered by NetApp^® ONTAP^® software and available around the world. This new AWS service makes it easy and cost effective to launch and run shared storage for Windows and Linux workloads, while offering NetApp’s suite of enterprise-grade data services—all running in an AWS native experience. 

To the thousands of existing customers who know and love ONTAP from their data centers, please know that Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP directly offers the full set of ONTAP features and APIs—all available on day 1. Besides managing ONTAP natively from the AWS Management Console or accessing APIs through AWS SDKs and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), you can easily add your AWS infrastructure to your NetApp Cloud Insights dashboard and use NetApp Cloud Manager to orchestrate all your data and cloud services. And if you’re a customer of Spot by NetApp, you can immediately tap into the power of Spot Storage, continually optimizing storage and compute resources to cost-effectively match application needs for virtual machines and containers. At the risk of hyperbole, this is a real game changer.

"We set out to provide customers with the full ONTAP experience, combined with the agility, scalability, and simplicity of an AWS service," said Edward Naim, General Manager of Amazon FSx, AWS. "Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP makes it even easier for customers to migrate applications and run them on AWS, using the same familiar storage workflows and data management capabilities they use on-premises. This service also unlocks the capabilities of ONTAP for cloud-native applications and workflows, enabling builders who may not have used ONTAP in the past to power their modern applications with fast, feature-rich, fully-managed shared storage that works seamlessly on Linux, macOS, and Windows."

For NetApp, this moment represents the culmination of years of hard work and continuous innovation bringing ONTAP to the cloud. Long trusted in the data center, we’re now the first and only storage environment that is truly enabled for hybrid cloud and natively integrated into each of the major public cloud providers.

This innovative foundation enables IT operations to extend data centers and migrate enterprise applications like SAP, relational databases, and virtual machines to AWS. But that’s just the beginning. We’ve progressively added a wide range of new cloud data services to help you back up, replicate, protect, and cache data while maintaining compliance. We empower you to successfully navigate the challenges of managing hybrid cloud infrastructure.

This tight integration of ONTAP into the infrastructure of AWS allows both born-in-the-cloud companies and stalwarts of industry to seamlessly use NetApp’s broader cloud portfolio. Any company—big or small, a department or a division, an integrator or an independent software vendor—can easily implement this technology. They’ll get NetApp’s powerful data services and applications combined with AWS-native APIs and rich services for launching, scaling, monitoring, and managing applications and workloads in AWS. Each of these services is designed to deliver immediate business value, whether in the form of cost efficiency, compliance, data protection, or performance.

To all the AWS customers and others who might be hearing about us for the first time, I say, welcome, and hold on to your hats. There’s a reason AWS chose NetApp. ONTAP provides fully-featured and high-performance shared storage for file and block workloads. Integrated with a wide range of enterprise-proven capabilities, ONTAP is the most efficient, resilient, and highest-performing data management software in the world. We make it easier and faster to build rich experiences and to manage data sets so you can migrate and run primary applications, extend on-premises infrastructure to the cloud for disaster recovery, build dev/test environments, back up data, burst and cache, and set the stage for stateful applications to run in containerized applications.

Our customers have come to rely on ONTAP and are eager to see its capabilities in AWS. “At Rescale—a widely-adopted platform for modern, cloud HPC—we manage and provide intelligent automation for the most demanding computational workloads,” said Joris Poort, Founder and CEO of Rescale. “We see Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as a huge step forward to deliver the best of cloud infrastructure for demanding HPC workloads. On-premises HPC workloads can seamlessly burst to the cloud using ONTAP’s efficient data movement and caching tools without requiring any changes to the underlying application logic.”

FSx for ONTAP is continually optimized and enhanced to provide enterprise-grade performance and management capabilities that have traditionally been limited to the data center. In addition, it provides support for multiprotocol access (i.e., concurrent NFS and SMB access) to the same data, in addition ONTAP’s full featured storage efficiency capabilities, including thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, and compaction to reduce costs by up to 90%. To reduce costs even more, infrequently accessed data is transitioned to a lower cost storage tier using a policy-based automated storage tiering feature. AWS runs and maintains the service, and customers simply configure and consume it.

To compensate for differences between data center and public cloud infrastructures, companies often have to rearchitect applications—or accept public cloud as secondary to the on-premises primary data center. FSx for ONTAP provides a fast path to the cloud, enabling application and storage administrators to launch, run, and scale fully managed ONTAP file and block storage on AWS with just a few clicks or API calls. They can migrate their applications to AWS without changing their applications or how they manage their data. AWS now manages ONTAP, so you can focus on your applications, your data, and your impact to the business.

FSx for ONTAP delivers value for containerized applications and cloud operations. This new era of cloud represents the intersection of DevOps, FinOps, SecOps, and DataOps. You can build modern applications by using storage, compute, and container infrastructures that don’t limit the capabilities of your applications, but that automatically adapt to optimize performance and improve efficiency. Simply put: more cloud, less cost.

“Kubernetes and containerized microservices are becoming a common way to deploy business critical apps in the cloud,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Sysdig. “Our Secure DevOps platform brings a wealth of security and monitoring capabilities to Kubernetes containers for customers running cloud-native applications. We are excited about using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as a shared data layer within our offering, enabling us to more quickly deliver new capabilities to customers.”

Depending on your business needs, FSx for ONTAP offers several options for protecting your data. NetApp Cloud Backup (integrated with FSx for ONTAP backups) delivers cost-effective backup and restore capabilities for cloud and on-premises ONTAP data. You can drastically reduce backup times and instantly restore data from in-place zero-impact NetApp Snapshot^™ copies if data loss, ransomware, or data inconsistency occurs. The NetApp SnapMirror^® feature provides highly available and efficient replication of data copies, including support for multiple Availability Zones and cross-region disaster recovery to protect and test against site outages without disruption. The NetApp FlexClone^® feature delivers fast, space-efficient copies and fully supports block-level “forever” replication.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP natively works with the NetApp suite of enterprise data services, opening a wide range of possibilities:

• Automated cloud compute and storage infrastructure optimization with Spot by NetApp
• Kubernetes application lifecycle and data management with NetApp Astra Control
• Hybrid cloud data management with Cloud Manager
• Complete visibility into hybrid cloud infrastructures with Cloud Insights
• Data governance and compliance with NetApp Cloud Data Sense (formerly Cloud Compliance)

For nearly a decade, NetApp and AWS engineers have worked together to create industry-leading cloud services. Hats off to all the teams who made this achievement possible. We are so excited to begin writing this new verse of innovation with AWS customers.

All the best of NetApp delivered with all the best of AWS!

To learn more, visit the home of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP on AWS or NetApp.com.