NetApp and AWS announce scale-out for Amazon FSx for ONTAP file systems

NetApp has announced at re:Invent, scale-out FSx for ONTAP file systems through its collaboration with AWS. Scale-out file systems offer up to nine times higher storage performance compared to existing file systems, enabling customers to run high-performance applications on AWS more quickly and efficiently.  

FSx for ONTAP enables customers to use ONTAP’s data management features for a wide variety of workloads, such as user and application file shares, relational databases (SAP HANA), data stores for VMware cloud on AWS and backup and disaster recovery. With the new enhancements, customers can now use FSx for ONTAP for a broader range of higher-performance use cases, such as high-performance computing (HPC), electronic design automation (EDA), visual effects (VFX) and film editing, life sciences, seismic analysis, machine learning, and generative AI.  

Organisations of all sizes are migrating on-premises workloads to AWS or deploying cloud native workloads to accelerate innovation, increase agility, improve security, and reduce costs. With FSx for ONTAP, customers have access to the full range of ONTAP features. These include multi-protocol access to data, point-in-time and space efficient Snapshot™ copies and replication for data protection, thin cloning for operational and cost efficiency and data tiering, deduplication and compression for improved cost savings. Scale-out file systems extend all these benefits with improved performance and capacity scalability.  

A single Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP scaled-out file system can deliver up to 36GB per second of throughput and 1.2 million SSD input/output operations per second (IOPS) - a nine times improvement in performance from today’s 4GB per second throughput and 160,000 SSD IOPS limit. Up to six pairs of file servers, each providing up to 6GB per second throughput and 200,000 SSD IOPS at sub-millisecond file operation latencies, operate as one single storage cluster. Compute applications benefit from the higher aggregate performance and a single petabyte scale namespace simplifying management of large datasets within a single storage system. Customers can easily lift and shift, extend or deploy new high-performance workloads on AWS, while leveraging ONTAP’s data management features along with AWS’s agility, scalability, and security.  

“To keep up with the current pace of innovation, especially in areas requiring vast data-processing, organizations need scalable storage that can serve as a strong foundation for their high-performance computing workloads,” said Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp. “Our focus with these new capabilities centers on increasing performance and scale for these innovative workloads while maintaining the strong data management capabilities in areas such as data lifecycle, backup, data recovery, and data movement that power Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. With these new capabilities, more customers can leverage our market-leading data management and security capabilities as they look to the cloud to scale operations or quickly adapt to changing market conditions.”  

“Customers are increasingly running and scaling compute-intensive workloads in AWS—leveraging AWS’s broad selection of analytics, AI, and ML services and virtually unlimited infrastructure to gain insights faster and accelerate innovation,” said Edward Naim, General Manager of File Storage at AWS. “With scale-out FSx for ONTAP file systems, customers can now bring and run their most compute-intensive ONTAP workloads to AWS without needing to change how they manage their data.”  

“Keeping pace with the rapid rate of cloud innovation requires agile, performant and secure solutions,” said David Miller, Senior Director & Fellow, IT Architecture at Arm. “In testing the new Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we’re successfully leveraging the benefits of the cloud to unlock a new set of scale-out storage capabilities and higher performance for our internal HPC workloads.”  

The latest capabilities open new use cases for NetApp and AWS partners to help customers take full advantage of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP to accelerate workload migration to AWS or deploy new compute and data-intensive applications in AWS for improved business efficiency and agility.