All the best of NetApp delivered with all the best of AWS

By Anthony Lye, SVP & GM Cloud Data Services, NetApp

AWS have just announced the general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a native AWS managed service powered by NetApp^® ONTAP^® software and available around the world. This new AWS service makes it easy and cost effective for businesses to launch and run shared storage for Windows and Linux workloads, while offering NetApp’s suite of enterprise-grade data services—all running in an AWS native experience. 

For NetApp, this moment represents the culmination of years of hard work and continuous innovation bringing ONTAP to the cloud. Long trusted in the data center, we’re now the first and only storage environment that is truly enabled for hybrid cloud and natively integrated into each of the major public cloud providers.

This innovative foundation enables IT operations to extend data centers and migrate enterprise applications like SAP, relational databases, and virtual machines to AWS. But that’s just the beginning. We’ve progressively added a wide range of new cloud data services to help you back up, replicate, protect, and cache data while maintaining compliance. We empower you to successfully navigate the challenges of managing hybrid cloud infrastructure.

To the thousands of existing customers who know and love ONTAP from their data centers, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP directly offers the full set of ONTAP features and APIs—all available on day 1. Besides managing ONTAP natively from the AWS Management Console or accessing APIs through AWS SDKs and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), you can easily add your AWS infrastructure to your NetApp Cloud Insights dashboard and use NetApp Cloud Manager to orchestrate all your data and cloud services. And if you’re a customer of Spot by NetApp, you can immediately tap into the power of Spot Storage, continually optimizing storage and compute resources to cost-effectively match application needs for virtual machines and containers. At the risk of hyperbole, this is a real game changer.

This tight integration of ONTAP into the infrastructure of AWS allows both born-in-the-cloud companies and stalwarts of industry to seamlessly use NetApp’s broader cloud portfolio. Any company—big or small, a department or a division, an integrator or an independent software vendor—can easily implement this technology. They’ll get NetApp’s powerful data services and applications combined with AWS-native APIs and rich services for launching, scaling, monitoring, and managing applications and workloads in AWS. Each of these services is designed to deliver immediate business value, whether in the form of cost efficiency, compliance, data protection, or performance.

There’s a reason AWS chose NetApp. ONTAP provides fully-featured and high-performance shared storage for file and block workloads. Integrated with a wide range of enterprise-proven capabilities, ONTAP is the most efficient, resilient, and highest-performing data management software in the world. We make it easier and faster to build rich experiences and to manage data sets so you can migrate and run primary applications, extend on-premises infrastructure to the cloud for disaster recovery, build dev/test environments, back up data, burst and cache, and set the stage for stateful applications to run in containerized applications.

Depending on your business needs, FSx for ONTAP offers several options for protecting your data. NetApp Cloud Backup (integrated with FSx for ONTAP backups) delivers cost-effective backup and restore capabilities for cloud and on-premises ONTAP data. You can drastically reduce backup times and instantly restore data from in-place zero-impact NetApp Snapshot^™ copies if data loss, ransomware, or data inconsistency occurs. The NetApp SnapMirror^® feature provides highly available and efficient replication of data copies, including support for multiple Availability Zones and cross-region disaster recovery to protect and test against site outages without disruption. The NetApp FlexClone^® feature delivers fast, space-efficient copies and fully supports block-level “forever” replication.

For nearly a decade, NetApp and AWS engineers have worked together to create industry-leading cloud services. Hats off to all the teams who made this achievement possible. We are so excited to begin writing this new verse of innovation with AWS customers.