MS SQL workloads SQL Server on FSx for ONTAP: Technology Overview

Learn how FSx for ONTAP can provide your Microsoft SQL workload with low-latency, instantaneous DB refresh, reliable backup, and disaster recovery (DR) – while providing cost-savings of up to 50%.

FSx for ONTAP is designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent performance. It provides up to tens of GB/s of throughput and millions of IOPS per file system, scalable and configurable on demand as needed.

FSx for ONTAP delivers consistent sub-millisecond latencies for solid state drive (SSD) storage, and tens of milliseconds of latency for capacity pool storage. 

FSx for ONTAP offers both NVMe (non-volatile memory express) and in-memory caching —allowing even lower latencies when accessing the most frequently-read data. 

FSx for ONTAP enables broadly accessible data that’s protected and secure, compliant and governed, analyzed and monitored.

FSx for ONTAP is highly available and durable across AWS Availability Zones (AZs) and is designed to provide continuous data availability for high-performance databases. It is powered by two servers in separate AZs, each with its own storage and automatically replicates the data between them to protect against component failure...

FSx for ONTAP supports restoration of individual files or databases to previous versions using NetApp’s lightweight, instantaneous Snapshots.

FSx for ONTAP provides cross-region replication with its SnapMirror technology, allowing you to replicate data between two FSx for ONTAP services in the same or in different AWS Regions as a fail over mechanism.. SnapMirror, provides a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) as low as 5 minutes, and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of single-digit minutes.

FSx for ONTAP automatically takes highly-durable, daily backups of every volume in the service. Backups are incremental relative to one another and crash-consistent. Additional backups can be created at any point.

FSx for ONTAP allows instantaneous cloning of storage volumes with its FlexClone technology. These new environments are point-in-time clones of the original volume, are fully writable, and incur almost zero capacity and therefore no significant additional cost. This helps spin up dev/test environments quickly and efficiently, shortening CI/CD pipelines and time to market.

FSx for ONTAP utilizes network bandwidth for storage, achieving the same performance with fewer EC2 cores and significantly saving on costs, compared to other storage services.

FSx for ONTAP can offer shared block storage with high availability across Multi-Availability Zones for two MS SQL servers in a failover cluster instance (FCI) deployment utilizing an MS SQL standard license. Data can be replicated into additional regions with built-in efficient cross-region replication. This eliminates the need for an always on availability groups (AOAG) architecture which requires the costlier MS SQL Enterprise license.

FSx for ONTAP allows instantaneous cloning of storage volumes with its FlexClone technology. These new environments that can be used for dev/test purposes are point-in-time clones of the original volume, are fully writable, and incur almost zero capacity and therefore no significant additional cost.

FSx for ONTAP utilizes ONTAP’s storage efficiency and cost-savings technologies, including compression and deduplication, to reduce storage consumption and costs.

Throughput levels can be scaled up or down as needed, providing constant optimal cost-performance.