Migrate your data to AWS seamlessly with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Hello everyone. All right, seeing some familiar faces.

Um today, we're gonna talk about um some of the challenges we've been hearing from our customers in terms of managing storage complexity on premise. And we're gonna cover Amazon FSx for ONTAP, which is AWS's answer to managing enterprise grade storage complexity through the cloud.

My name is Ozan Talo. I'm a senior manager of solution architecture here at AWS and um let's switch to our agenda.

Let's first uh talk a little bit about the challenge that we have in the storage industry. This um and then we're gonna cover a little bit about uh why customers are choosing cloud for their network attached storage. And then later on, we're gonna talk a little bit about two use cases on FSx ONTAP for NetApp. And lastly, I'm gonna leave you with some material that is helpful in your learning. If you're interested in this content, hopefully, you can take that QR code back to your teams.

So let's take a little deep dive into what the problems are and challenges are on the storage. Of course, we've all been through the growth of internet enabled devices and and the large ecosystem of inbound traffic that's generating the storage and there's more file um data everywhere. And most of the times this is unstructured data from your home drives your engineering artifacts, your backup and disaster recovery and your compliance related archival. And in most cases, this file storage is sitting in silos in across multiple locations and the customers are dealing with this complexity through a variety of ways.

But ONTAP is considered to be one of the leading storage products that customers are leaning on to deal with this on premise complexity and it's been around for over 30 years. And the reason why customers are really liking this product is because of the really rich set of capabilities that ONTAP has to offer.

Um and uh including managing this complexity, managing the the security layer as well as managing a multi data center replication capabilities that it natively offers provides really rich set of capabilities. We also consistently hear from our customers that they've built their entire automation and their work flows over the past two decades around this technology and it would be super hard for them to move away to other storage solutions um that don't offer this level of rich capabilities at the same time.

Um our customers tell us that managing um the storage complexity on premises have unique set of challenges. There's rapidly growing storage is um creating increased cost in terms of storage, hardware storage, networking, and other data center costs. You also have the long lead times associated with ordering a storage array and deploying that storage array which is an anti pattern to the that rapid storage growth. And furthermore, it holds the the application layer which depend on that storage layer hostage because there is not uh the availability of storage becomes of question.

And lastly the to make the storage available to your end users and to customers, it takes a lot of overhead from the it staff to upkeep all of this um data infrastructure and this these challenges obviate the reason why customers are moving their network attached storage to the cloud.

And uh I won't go into each one of these benefits, but to sum it up, um you know, managing storage at scale is hard and all the things that make it hard on premise is also the reasons why it's much, much easier in the cloud. For example, just the agility benefit alone allows you to bypass all the upfront planning necessary on your storage layer.

Our goal with FSx ONTAP really is to give our customers the best of both worlds, the rich ONTAP capabilities coupled with the benefits of running an AWS native fully managed service in the cloud.

We've launched the service in 2021 and with purpose built it in a way that when you go into AWS console and click create, you really get a full untapped file system and we run a single tenanted file system and ONTAP file system dedicated to you, which then allows you to run your own ONTAP cli commands, it allows you to create your own replication relationships. And again, this is only possible because of the differentiated way AWS has constructed the service where the service is dedicated to you.

And of course, it comes with all the benefits that you would expect in running in the cloud including availability, scalability, and simplicity, which all comes from not being responsible to run the undifferentiated layers of the technical stack.

Um you know, we, we've seen a lot of excitement from our customers that are able to leverage the service to show real business outcomes in terms of cost savings compared to running it in on premises, reduced operational load from their it staff in managing that stack. But it, it more importantly the because of the way that FSx ONTAP is built where it's a sim similar architecture to what you have on premises, it makes the customer's journey to migrate their data stores to the cloud much, much easier.

We did a story with uh with a study with Forrester at the beginning of this year. We've done, they've done in and surveyed a few of our customers that have gone through the journey of adopting a FSx. And um and I think the a lot of what the study study is showing is the marriage of the two concepts, which is rich features of FSx ONTAP. With the simplicity you get with AWS is really paying off. It's allowing customers to seize the benefits of what klaus has to offer in a rapid way.

One fun anecdote that we've also gotten as a part of this at the early part of the year is from a leading uh semiconductor firm that's running an ed a workload that is the chip manufacturing related workload on on FSx ONTAP. This customer has 10 do it yourself implementations on AWS using EC2 and EBS. At the same time, they're migrating to this FSx ONTAP to manage service and one fun fun anecdote they said is they're having spending much less time managing 50 FSx ONTAP implementations as compared to 10. do it yourself implementations of ONTAP even though both are running in the cloud. This speaks to what we are really trying to get to really uh the theme that's out there is we want to make it easier and easier and easier for our customers to manage storage in the cloud.

Now, let's um dive a little bit into a cool capability within FSx ONTAP. And that is um the FSx ONTAP tearing capability. This capability ultimately supports cost optimized way to achieve high performance storage that's available for different types of workloads.

The two tiers are high performance SSD tier which is for your active data layer which provides sub millisecond latency access to that data. And then the capacity pool is an elastic data layer that grows and shrinks based on your data needs FSx ONTAP auto tier allows you to move the data between these two layers with the net result of achieving SSD performance at a fraction of the cost.

Let's touch on a few of the use cases. A lot of the customers we talked to um they're one of their most immediate um needs that they share with us is they want to get out of the business of managing their secondary data centers. Perhaps they have a workload that needs to remain on prem but they are also running a secondary data center and they want to move off of and with FSx ONTAP, moving your disaster recovery site to FSx ONTAP is simple. You're essentially using the, the ONTAP native solution called snap mirror and simply change the replication relationship to FSx ONTAP. And there you go, your, your data and all your configurations get moved to the cloud.

At the same time, a bunch of our customers are also moving a bunch of their workloads to the cloud entirely. These can be SAP HANA workloads an ER P solution. It can be a SaaS workload or it can be an application that requires this performance storage infrastructure. Whether um and, and, and when, when that move occurs, the benefit of that is you're not only offloading the management of the storage layer, you're also offloading the management of the compute layer and that further reduces the burden on the it staff.

The third thing we see is um customers that need to have the compute sometimes need to remain on prem perhaps this is your laptop and you're looking to map your home drive um to the storage layer. In fact, last year at re invent, Vanguard came in and spoke to us about one of these use cases where they have moved their entire production workload to FSx ONTAP. And then they have also deployed the s netapp filers on premise um for local caching. And they have used uh flex cash, which is again an on tab native capability to cash the needed data on premise.

Um and with this use case, of course, you have low latency access to most frequently used data while not being required to manage the full data stack.

And last use case, I'll tell you that's very common we're seeing is globally distributed teams. And in this use case, we actually have a customer that have teams in north America and they have other teams in a p a. So they're running two FSx ONTAP environments, one in us e two, and the other one in seoul, Korea. And they're using the flex cash um synchronization capability to keep the, the these FSx ONTAP instances actively syncing with each other. This is then giving real time fast access to users while at the same time providing the same name space between these two instances, which then reduces the complexity of these teams.

Now let's dive into the migration use case just a little more.

Uh first let's touch on snap mirror. So snap mirror, snap mirror is a block level replication uh technology that's built into ONTAP. And this essentially provides a replication of storage v ms, the volumes, the clusters as well as the um all the configuration instances between um ONTAP instances. So if you're running ONTAP on prem, a net app uh ONTAP storage on prem, you can simply turn on um snap mirror and then through AWS uh direct connect or the side to side vpn, you're able to replicate your data between on prem and um FSx ONTAP.

If you're not using a native netapp storage uh solution, then you can standard, use the standard replication technologies like an r sync or robo copy or AWS data sync to move your data from on prem to the cloud.

The second use case I'll touch on is um around hybrid use cases. A lot of our customers are reaching the end of their storage availability and are ready to make a decision on how to expand their storage. And if, if you're in the case of trying to entirely move off of running any storage device on prem, you can simply mount a cloud storage volume to your on premise compute and whether that's a linux system or a windows system or a mac os and use that cloud volume to gain access to near infinite capacity that's available on AWS.

Of course, in this use case, there is some latency uh and that, that you your, your structure would need to allow. in that use case. Of course, not everybody is in that boat. Some of the customers are looking for low latency access to storage. In that scenario, you can do what Vanguard did, which is basically implement a NetApp filer on prem or repurpose one of your existing NetApp infrastructure to cache the local data and then expose that to your local compute for that fa fast access at the AWS.

We can't be finished with any presentation without a customer anecdote. So here we go. Advanced MD is one of our FSx ONTAP customers, but where they started was um they're essentially a medical office, uh uh practice management software and um they, they deal with electronic health records. Therefore, they're in the hi a hi a land.

Um they were a divestiture from ADP the payment company and when they got divested, they were left with managing self managing a large array of on premise, NetApp devices and their staff that was left was over tasked with that with that duty. And frankly, they were not able to meet their customers needs. There was cost cost overrun issues and there was complexity that was overburdening that smaller team.

The solution there was FSx, NetApp, ONTAP. They've migrated their workloads and they have um offloaded the the software maintenance aspect to the cloud. They've offloaded the scalability aspect of managing that complexity to FSx ONTAP. And furthermore, because of the tearing compression, compaction related storage efficiencies, they've actually seen a saving of cost as they embarked on the FSx ONTAP journey.

As we get close to the end of our presentation, I want to leave you with a few learning um opportunities. You can scan this QR code and, and take it to your teams. But we've got some skill builder, free resources for you to dive deep into our storage solution. There's also a badge that you can get to validate your knowledge and frankly take back to your teams for them to get their badge of knowledge as they go through it.

And uh and that brings me to the end of my conversation. I wanna thank you for being here and uh please take the time to um look at the the session survey and give us some feedback.

Thank you. Have a good rest of your re invent.