Amazon FSx

Amazon FSx Family Comparison

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| Primary Use Case| Windows-based applications, home directories, media workflows | High-Performance Computing (HPC), machine learning, big data | Enterprise applications, databases, file shares, data protection | High-performance Linux workloads, media processing, financial analytics |

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Provides a fully managed native Microsoft Windows file system with full support for SMB, NTFS, and Active Directory (AD) integration.

Key Features & Use Cases

Native Windows Compatibility: Ideal for Windows-based application workloads requiring shared file storage.
Active Directory (AD) Integration: Integrates with your existing Microsoft AD for user authentication and permissions at the file/folder level.
Distributed File System (DFS) Namespaces: Group file shares on multiple file systems into a single common namespace to scale out storage and throughput.
Storage Quotas: Limit the amount of data a user can store.
Data Deduplication: Reduces storage costs by eliminating redundant data.
Supported Workloads: Lift-and-shift enterprise applications, home directories, media transcoding, and web serving.

Performance & Storage

Storage Type: SSD storage by default, with HDD options available for Single-AZ deployments.
Capacity: Up to 64 TB per file system.
Throughput: Up to 2 GB/s per file system. Performance can be scaled out further with DFS Namespaces.

Data Access & Migration

Access: Accessible from EC2, WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0, and VMware Cloud on AWS. On-premises access is available via AWS Direct Connect or VPN.
Mounting: Use the standard Windows "Map Network Drive" functionality.
Migration: Use Windows's Robust File Copy (RoboCopy) to migrate data and metadata (like ACLs and ownership) to FSx.

High Availability & Backups

Deployment Options: Supports both single-AZ and multi-AZ deployments for high availability.
Backups: Takes automatic, daily, file-system-consistent backups to Amazon S3 using Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
Shadow Copies: Supports restoring individual files and folders to previous versions using native Windows shadow copies.

Security

Authentication: Identity-based authentication via Microsoft AD.
Encryption: Automatically encrypts data at-rest using AWS KMS and in-transit using SMB Kerberos session keys.
Compliance: ISO, PCI-DSS, and SOC compliant, and HIPAA eligible.

Amazon FSx for Lustre

A high-performance file system optimized for fast processing of workloads like High-Performance Computing (HPC), machine learning, and media processing. Lustre is a popular open-source parallel file system.

Key Features & Use Cases

High Performance: Designed for workloads that require fast, parallel access to large datasets, delivering sub-millisecond latencies, up to hundreds of GB/s of throughput, and millions of IOPS.
POSIX-Compliant: Provides a POSIX-compliant file system interface.
Concurrent Access: Supports access to the same file or directory from thousands of compute instances concurrently.

S3 Integration

Data Repository: Can be linked to an Amazon S3 bucket. When linked, the FSx for Lustre file system transparently presents S3 objects as files.
Data Flow: You can read data from S3 into your file system for processing and write results back to S3 for long-term storage. This allows you to use FSx as a high-performance "hot" storage layer on top of your S3 "cold" storage data lake.

Storage Options

SSD: For latency-sensitive workloads.
HDD: For throughput-intensive workloads that don't require sub-millisecond latencies, reducing storage costs by up to 80%.

Data Access & Migration

Access: Mount from EC2 instances or on-premises clients over AWS Direct Connect or VPN.
Migration: Use parallel copy tools to import data at high speeds.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Provides a fully managed file system powered by NetApp's popular ONTAP file system software. It allows you to move or extend your existing on-premises ONTAP-based workloads to AWS without changing your application code or data management processes.

Key Features

Multi-Protocol Support: Provides file and block storage over multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, and iSCSI.
ONTAP Features: Supports familiar ONTAP features like snapshots, thin provisioning, data deduplication, compression, and cloning.
Data Replication: Use NetApp SnapMirror to easily replicate data between your on-premises ONTAP systems and FSx for ONTAP.
Data Tiering: Automatically tiers less-frequently-accessed data from SSD storage to a lower-cost capacity pool to save costs.

Use Cases

Enterprise Applications: Lift-and-shift enterprise applications that rely on ONTAP's features.
Databases: High-performance storage for databases like Oracle, SQL Server, and SAP HANA.
Disaster Recovery: Use as a disaster recovery target for on-premises ONTAP systems.

Amazon FSx for OpenZFS

Provides a fully managed file system built on the powerful OpenZFS file system. It's designed for high-performance, data-intensive workloads, particularly for Linux-based applications.

Key Features

High Performance: Delivers very high IOPS with low latency, powered by AWS Graviton processors and NVMe caching.
Advanced Data Management: Provides powerful ZFS features like point-in-time snapshots, data cloning, and configurable data compression.
Data Integrity: Built to protect your data with features like checksums and automatic data healing.
Volumes and Filesystems: Supports a hierarchical structure of volumes within a single file system, each with its own specific configuration for size, compression, etc.

Use Cases

Cloud-Native Applications: High-performance storage for containerized and microservices-based applications.
Media Processing: Fast storage for media rendering, transcoding, and streaming workflows.
Financial Analytics: Low-latency storage for risk modeling and trade analytics applications.

Amazon FSx

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