NetApp & AWS launch FSx for ONTAP, boosting storage performance nine-fold

NetApp in collaboration with AWS has launched FSx for ONTAP file systems, introducing an impressive nine times increase in storage performance compared to pre-existing file systems. With higher performance, businesses can speed up their migration to cloud and improve use cases in high-performance computing (HPC), electronic design automation (EDA), visual effects (VFX) film editing, life sciences, seismic analysis, machine learning, and generative AI.

The latest solution further enables businesses to utilise market-leading data management and security, thereby staying apace with innovation. San Jose-based intelligent data infrastructure company, NetApp, made the announcement at re:Invent, stating that the scale-out FSx for ONTAP file systems allow customers to run high-performance applications on AWS more quickly and efficiently.

FSx for ONTAP opens the door for clients to use ONTAP's data management features across various workloads including user and application file shares, relational databases like SAP HANA, data stores for VMware cloud on AWS, and backup and disaster recovery. The new enhancements expand the scope of use of FSx for ONTAP for higher-performance use cases.

As organisations of various sizes continue to migrate on-premise workloads to AWS or launch cloud native workloads, FSx for ONTAP's newly introduced capabilities offer agility, enhance security, reduce cost, and speed up innovation. These range from multi-protocol access to data to 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. Added to this, scale-out file systems extend these benefits with enhanced performance and capacity scalability.

A single Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP scaled-out file system can offer up to 36GB per second of throughput and 1.2 million SSD input/output operations per second (IOPS) which is a nine times improvement in performance from the current 4GB per second throughput and 160,000 SSD IOPS limit.

Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp, shared his perspective, "To keep up with the current pace of innovation, especially in areas requiring vast data-processing, organisations need scalable storage that can serve as a strong foundation for their high-performance computing workloads." Highlighting the focus of these new capabilities, Schwartz emphasised 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.

Edward Naim, General Manager of File Storage at AWS, noted how customers are increasingly running and scaling compute-intensive workloads in AWS and leveraging AWS's broad selection of analytics, AI, and ML services. He expressed, "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."

Organisations look to capitalise on the updated capabilities of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP to fast-track workload migration to AWS or deploy new compute and data-intensive applications in AWS for improved business efficiency and agility.

As of now, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP scale-out capabilities are available in multiple AWS regions encompassing US East (Ohio, North Virginia); US West (Oregon); Europe (Ireland); and Asia Pacific (Sydney).