Storage can be the make-or-break factor in a cloud business case. Over provisioning leads to skyrocketing costs, while under provisioning bottlenecks performance and disrupts operations.
To help our users navigate this balancing act, we are excited to announce that Cloudamize has partnered with AWS and NetApp to bring Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP) recommendations at the drive level. This new capability allows you to map on-premises storage to one of the most robust and cost-effective storage solution with pinpoint accuracy, giving you the data you need to build compelling, winning migration strategies.
What is Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP?
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a fully managed, multiprotocol storage service in the AWS Cloud with the proven management capabilities of NetApp ONTAP for easier workload migration and operation. It combines the familiar ONTAP capabilities and APIs with the agility, scalability, and simplicity of a fully managed AWS service.
FSx for ONTAP helps organizations migrate and run enterprise workloads in AWS while supporting a broad range of use cases — including VMware-based workloads and relational databases — by providing high-performance shared storage accessible via industry-standard protocols such as NFS, SMB, iSCSI, NVMe/TCP, and S3 object protocols.
For performance-sensitive workloads such as VMware and databases, FSx for ONTAP delivers consistent, high throughput and sub-millisecond latencies with SSD storage. It also allows customers to scale storage performance and capacity independently from compute resources, enabling a flexible architecture and helping right-size resources without overprovisioning.
The FSx for ONTAP Advantage: How It Actually Generates Savings
FSx for ONTAP brings the enterprise-grade data management capabilities of ONTAP to a fully managed AWS service. But beyond performance and familiarity, FSx for ONTAP is fundamentally designed to shrink storage footprints and drastically reduce monthly cloud bills.
Here is exactly how FSx for ONTAP actively generates those savings:
- Advanced Storage Efficiencies: FSx for ONTAP natively utilizes data deduplication, compression, and compaction. By eliminating redundant data blocks and compressing the rest at the storage layer, organizations routinely see up to 65% storage capacity savings for general-purpose workloads.
- Elastic Capacity Pool Tiering: Not all data needs to reside on expensive, high-performance SSDs. FSx for ONTAP automatically monitors access patterns and seamlessly tiers inactive or “cold” data to a lower-cost capacity pool. You only pay SSD rates for the active or “hot” fraction of your data, while the bulk of your growing dataset scales on highly economical storage.
- Thin Provisioning: With FSx for ONTAP, volumes only consume storage capacity for the actual data written, rather than the total volume size allocated. This eliminates the financial penalty of over-provisioning storage up front just to be safe.
- Built-in Data Management: FSx for ONTAP also provides snapshots, cloning, and cross-region replication technology that supports robust data migration, disaster recovery, and speeds up Dev/Test workflows — all with the click of a button.
- Decreasing SSD storage capacity: With FSx for ONTAP, you can scale down storage capacity, right-sizing post-deployment within a highly available production-ready system. The impact extends beyond simple capacity management, allowing organizations running data-intensive, project-based workloads to optimize costs and improve resource efficiency by eliminating the need to overprovision for peak demand periods.
Why “Drive-Level” Recommendations Matters
Until now, mapping legacy infrastructure to advanced cloud storage often required broad assumptions. By bringing FSx for ONTAP recommendations down to the drive level, Cloudamize eliminates the guesswork.
Instead of looking at a server’s total storage in aggregate, Cloudamize evaluates the unique performance profiles, IOPS, and utilization metrics of each individual drive. This means you can confidently recommend FSx for ONTAP for the specific drives that will benefit most from deduplication and auto-tiering, while routing other drives to standard Amazon EBS volumes if that proves more cost-effective.
By integrating FSx for ONTAP in the Cloudamize assessment, customers gain deeper visibility into how different storage services align with their workload requirements, enabling more informed decisions and greater confidence in selecting the right storage architecture for their AWS migration. Precision at this granular level ensures that every gigabyte is optimized before the migration even begins.
This level of granularity is especially valuable for projects such as Re-Host from VMware into native Amazon EC2, where storage was previously mapped at the server level. With drive-level visibility, Cloudamize can now distinguish between the individual drives attached to each VM, recommending FSx for ONTAP only where it delivers the most value and routing the rest to lower-cost alternatives where appropriate. The result is a more cost-optimized option in the assessment, rather than a single broad-brush recommendation applied uniformly across every drive on the server.
Empowering Partners to Win the Migration
For our partner ecosystem, the ability to offer drive-level FSx for ONTAP recommendations is a massive competitive advantage. When bidding for a migration project, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is heavily scrutinized by stakeholders.
Here is how this new feature helps partners close the deal:
- Lowering the TCO Barrier: By leveraging FSx for ONTAP’s deduplication and tiering capabilities in your Cloudamize assessments, you can present a significantly lower projected AWS bill to your prospects. A highly optimized TCO often makes the difference between a stalled initiative and a green-lit migration.
- Providing Versatile Storage Options: Enterprise clients have complex storage needs spanning SMB, NFS, iSCSI, NVMe-over-TCP, and S3 protocols. Recommending FSx for ONTAP allows partners to offer a unified storage architecture that supports both file and block workloads seamlessly, solving multiple client headaches at once.
- De-risking the Move: Recommending a transition of legacy NetApp environments directly into FSx for ONTAP provides a comfortable, familiar operational environment for the client’s IT team. They keep the snapshots, clones, and replication tools they already know, while you deliver the agility and scale of the cloud.
Ready to Optimize?
By combining the analytical depth of Cloudamize with the storage efficiency of FSx for ONTAP, we are equipping you to build smarter, cost-effective, and more resilient cloud environments.
Run a free AWS assessment with FSx for ONTAP recommendations today >>
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