Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP FAQs

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a fully managed ONTAP file system as a service in the AWS cloud. It is purposely built to optimally answer the performance, resilience, accessibility and cost needs of business-critical workloads, delivering optimized results through a comprehensive and flexible set of features. For users familiar with on-premises ONTAP, FSx for ONTAP provides the same familiar features, performance, and APIs together with the agility, scalability, and simplicity of a fully managed AWS service.

FSx for ONTAP is an intelligent data storage infrastructure, that provides a wide array of cost/performance features for running business critical workloads on AWS. These include databases, VMware, GenAI, file sharing and more. Using the FSx for ONTAP service, you can easily launch and run performant, scalable, and cost-effective workloads based on a feature-rich data storage solution that you can access from virtually any client or workstation running in AWS or on-premises. FSx for ONTAP leverages NetApp ONTAP’s accessibility, resilience, security, mobility and cost efficiency features to optimize workloads running on AWS. These include snapshots, cloning, multi-protocol access, cross-region replication and many more.

FSx for ONTAP also supports hybrid workflows between AWS and on-premises by using ONTAP features to migrate your data to AWS. Hybrid workflows can enjoy the agility, scalability, resiliency, and security of running applications in AWS without giving up any of the on-premises capabilities you’re used to.

FSx for ONTAP is designed to support a broad range of business-critical workloads such as databases (including SAP HANA, Oracle DB, Oracle RAC, and Microsoft SQL Server), enterprise file sharing, VMware, and GenAI applications. These are used in an abundance of industries such as electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, automotive, financial services and manufacturing.

FSx for ONTAP supports NFS, SMB, NVMe-over-TCP and iSCSI protocols. You can access your data from Linux, Windows, or macOS instances running on Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, VMware Cloud on AWS, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon AppStream 2.0. FSx for ONTAP is also certified as an external datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS Software Defined Data Centers (SDDCs).

To use FSx for ONTAP, simply access the service from your AWS account or sign up to AWS if you don’t have one. Within the AWS account, you can get started by creating a file system via the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and Amazon FSx API (and various language-specific SDKs). You can also create an FSx for ONTAP file system using NetApp BlueXP.

If you are using file storage on-premises that is using a NetApp ONTAP system, you can use NetApp SnapMirror to quickly and efficiently copy your data and configuration into an FSx for ONTAP file system over AWS Direct Connect or VPN. If you are migrating from a non-NetApp file system, you can use any standard copy tool (e.g., rsync, Robocopy) or NetApp CloudSync to migrate data into FSx for ONTAP.

See the Migrating to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP blog post for more information.

With FSx for ONTAP, you pay only for the resources you use with no minimum fees or set-up charges. Refer to AWS for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP pricing details.

Please refer to Regional Products and Services for more on regional availability of FSx for ONTAP.