New – Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Back in 2018, I wrote about the first two members Amazon family of fully managed, highly reliable and high-performance file systems Amazon FSx for Lustre and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

• Amazon FSx：
  https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/
• Amazon FSx for Lustre
  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-fsx-for-lustre/
• Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-fsx-for-windows-file-server-fast-fully-managed-and-secure/

Both services enable you to use common open source and commercially licensed file systems without having to deal with hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, backups, and more. Since launch, we've added many new features to both services to meet your requirements:

Amazon FSx for Lustre now supports persistent file systems with SSD and HDD based storage for long term storage and workloads, storage capacity scaling, crash consistent backups, data compression and storage quota

• Based on SSD and HDD:
  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-high-performance-hdd-storage-for-amazon-fsx-for-lustre-file-systems/
• Storage capacity expansion:
  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/amazon-fsx-for-lustre-now-enables-you-to-grow-storage-on-your-file-system/
• Crash consistent backup:
  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/06/amazon-fsx-lustre-provides-highly-durable-file-system-backups/
• data compression:
  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/amazon-fsx-for-lustre-now-supports-data-compression/
• Storage Quota:
  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/amazon-fsx-lustre-supports-storage-quotas/

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now supports many enterprise-ready features including Multi-AZ File System, Self-Managed Active Directory, Fine- File Recovery, 161e56858e1c07 File Access Auditing , Storage Size and Capacity Throughput Scaling and Low The HDD storage option costs .

• Enterprise-ready features:
  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-fsx-for-windows-file-server-update-new-enterprise-ready-features/
• file access audit
  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/file-access-auditing-is-now-available-for-amazon-fsx-for-windows-file-server/
• Low-cost HDD storage options
  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-low-cost-hdd-storage-option-for-amazon-fsx-for-windows-file-server/

Because these services support file access and storage patterns that Lustre and Windows File Server users already understand, it's easy to migrate existing applications and fine-tune existing operating scenarios when using them. While migrations are important, so are new applications! All Amazon FSx systems make it easy to build applications that require high-performance, fully managed storage combined with the rich features that file systems provide.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

As I always tell you, we're always looking for more ways to meet our customers' needs. To that end, we're about to launch Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP . You get the popular features, performance, and API ONTAP file systems and the agility, scalability, security, and resiliency of Amazon Cloud Technology, making it easier to integrate on-premises deployments that rely on network attached storage (NAS) devices Application migration to Amazon Cloud Technologies.

• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
  https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/netapp-ontap/
• API
  https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap-automation/index.html

ONTAP ( NetApp product) is an enterprise data management product designed to provide high-performance storage suitable for use with Oracle, SAP, VMware, Microsoft SQL Server, and more. ONTAP is flexible and scalable, supporting multi-protocol access and a file system that scales up to 176 PiB. It supports a variety of features designed to make data management cheaper and easier, including inline data compression, deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, replication ( SnapMirror ) and point-in-time cloning ( FlexClone ).

• ONTAP
  https://www.netapp.com/data-management/ontap-data-management-software/
• NetApp
  https://www.netapp.com/
• SnapMirror
  https://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.netapp.doc.pow-dap%2FGUID-90A46DC2-C432-43D7-A890-EE342FC8C382.html
• FlexClone
  https://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.netapp.doc.dot-cm-concepts%2FGUID-54F78C62-B4D5-46FF-AE25-7440A3E65185.html

Amazon FSx for ONTAP is fully managed, so you can start enjoying all these features in minutes. Amazon Cloud Technologies Provisions file servers and storage volumes, manages replication, installs software updates and patches, replaces poorly behaving infrastructure components, manages failover, and more. Whether you're migrating data from an on-premises NAS environment, or building a brand new cloud-native application, you'll find there's a lot to like! If you're migrating, you can enjoy all the benefits of a fully managed file system, while benefiting from your existing tools, workflows, processes, and operational expertise. If you're building a completely new application, you can leverage ONTAP's rich feature set to create a cloud-native experience. Either way, you can scale to support tens of thousands of IOPS and benefit from continued behind-the-scenes evolution of compute, storage and networking components.

There are two storage tiers, and you can enable smart tiering to move data back and forth between them as needed:

• Primary storage on a high-performance solid-state drive (SSD) designed to hold data-active and/or latency-sensitive segments. Up to 192 TiB of primary storage can be provisioned per filesystem.
• capacity pool storage can grow and shrink as needed and can be expanded to gigabytes. It is cost-optimized and designed to preserve data that is not frequently accessed.

Within each Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file system, you can create one or more storage virtual machines (SVMs), each of which supports one or more volumes. Volumes can be accessed via NFS, SMB or as an iSCSI LUN for shared block storage.

As you can see from this diagram, you can access each volume from Amazon Cloud Computing Services, VMware Cloud on Amazon, and on-premises applications:

If your on-premises applications already use ONTAP in your own data center, you can easily create ONTAP file systems in the cloud, NetApp SnapMirror , and take advantage of all the benefits Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP already offers.

• NetApp SnapMirror
  https://www.netapp.com/data-protection/backup-recovery/snapmirror-data-replication/

Started with Amazon

I can create my first filesystem from the command line, Amazon Cloud Technology Management Console , or NetApp Cloud Manager I can also call the API or use the Amazon CloudFormation template. I will use the admin console.

• Amazon Cloud Technology Management Console
  https://console.aws.amazon.com/
• NetApp Cloud Manager
  https://cloud.netapp.com/cloud-manager

Each filesystem runs in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), so I start by choosing an Amazon VPC and a pair of subnets (preferred and alternate). Each SVM has an endpoint in an Availability Zone associated with both subnets, with continuous monitoring, automatic failover, and automatic failback to ensure high availability.

I open the Amazon FSx console, click Create File System, select Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and click Next:

I can choose to create quickly and use a set of best practices, or create standard and set all options myself. I will choose the first option because I can change all configuration options later if necessary. I choose Quick Create, enter the name of my filesystem (jb-fsx-ontap-1), and set the storage capacity in GiB. I also selected Amazon VPC, and enabled ONTAP's storage efficiency features:

I confirmed all my selections and noticed that this option will also create a storage VM (fsx) and a volume (vol1) for me. Then I clicked create filesystem "do this":

The filesystem state starts out as creating, then transitions to usable in about 20 minutes:

Soon after, my first volume went from "pending" to "created" and my first volume also went from "pending" to "created". I can click on the SVM to learn more and see the full set of management and access endpoints it provides:

I can click Volumes in the left nav and see all my volumes. The root volume (fsx_root) is automatically created and represents all storage space on the SVM:

I can select a volume and click Attach for custom instructions for attaching it to an Amazon EC2 instance running Amazon Linux or Windows:

I can select a volume and choose Update Volume from the Actions menu to change the volume's path, size, storage efficiency, or tiering policy:

To learn more about tiering strategies, see About Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP storage.

I can click create volume and create other volumes in any of my filesystems:

There's a lot more to show you, so be sure to fire up the console and try it out for yourself.

Notes

Here are a few things to know about Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP:

1. Region — The new file system is available in most Amazon Cloud Tech regions and Amazon GovCloud; see the Amazon Cloud Tech Region Service listing for more information.
2. Pricing - Pricing based on multiple usage dimensions, including primary storage, capacity pool storage, throughput capacity, additional SSD IOPS, and backup storage consumption; see the Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP pricing page for more information.
3. Connectivity — You can use Amazon Direct Connect to connect on-premises applications to a new file system. You can use Aamzon Transit Gateway to connect to Amazon VPCs in other accounts and/or regions.
4. Availability — As I mentioned earlier, each filesystem is backed by Amazon Cloud Technologies infrastructure in a pair of Availability Zones. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP automatically replicates data between regions and monitors the Amazon cloud infrastructure, initiates failovers (typically within 60 seconds), and then replaces infrastructure components as needed. Every file system has a 99.99% availability Amazon SLA.

• Amazon Cloud Technology Regional Services:
  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/
• Amazon Direct Connect:
  https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
• Amazon Transit Gateway:
  https://aws.amazon.com/transit-gateway/?whats-new-cards.sort-by=item.additionalFields.postDateTime&whats-new-cards.sort-order=desc