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Unleashing the power of NetApp ONTAP on AWS with Skaylink
Lead Solution Architect
As a trusted NetApp partner, we help our customers unlock the full potential of NetApp technologies in hybrid scenarios and in the cloud. We were delighted that the NetApp and Skaylink teams were able to meet at the recent AWS Summit Hamburg to strengthen our collaboration and explore joint opportunities.
FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN), the first-party AWS service, is a great complement and problem solver for many different use cases. It’s a fully managed AWS service that brings the popular NetApp ONTAP file system to the cloud. It provides the same rich data management features that customers rely on in their on-premises ONTAP environments, such as snapshots, cloning, deduplication, compression and tiering, while integrating seamlessly with AWS infrastructure. Supporting multiple protocols, FSxN is ideal for a wide range of workloads, including highly demanding enterprise applications such as SAP. With built-in high availability, scalability and performance, FSxN is a powerful solution for customers looking to modernize and simplify their cloud storage while keeping an eye on their cloud bill.
Accelerating Data Migrations
For customers moving to the cloud, data migration is often one of the most complex and critical phases. FSxN simplifies this process. Support for NFS (Linux workloads), SMB (Windows workloads) and iSCSI (disks) means that customers can migrate existing workloads without having to change the architecture of their applications. NetApp SnapMirror enables efficient, low-downtime replication from on-premises ONTAP systems to FSxN, facilitating the implementation of hybrid and transitional architectures.
At Skaylink, we have seen first-hand how this can significantly reduce migration timelines and risks, particularly for customers operating large file-based workloads.
Resilience in Hybrid and Cloud-Native Scenarios
FSxN provides built-in multi-AZ support, ensuring high availability and resilience for critical workloads. For hybrid use cases, customers can use SnapMirror to mirror their data between on-premises environments and the cloud, keeping both sides synchronised. This enables disaster recovery with a very low RPO and RTO, and it also works between AWS regions.
Whether operating in a hybrid model or adopting a cloud-native approach, FSxN delivers the reliability and performance enterprises demand, combined with the flexibility of cloud-native scaling.
Significant cost savings
Another key advantage of FSxN is cost optimization. Compared to alternatives such as FSx for Windows File Server, FSxN provides more advanced storage efficiency features.
- Deduplication and compression – reduce the physical storage footprint.
- Thin provisioning allocates storage more efficiently and avoids over-provisioning.
- Intelligent tiering automatically moves cold data to lower-cost storage tiers.
These capabilities help customers significantly reduce their total storage costs while meeting their performance and availability needs.
Enabling sovereignty in the cloud
Sovereignty is an increasingly important topic, especially in regulated industries and among customers in Europe. FSxN allows customers to run NetApp ONTAP natively in the AWS Cloud while retaining complete control over their data management policies.
They can maintain sovereignty using features such as volume-level data encryption with customer-managed keys, strict access controls and detailed audit logs, all of which are integrated with AWS services. Combined with increased workload portability, the support for all hyperscalers in many regions and further data residency features, this provides customers with a cloud-native path. This path respects national and industry-specific compliance requirements. It also helps to reduce lock-in effects on a hyperscaler. This means that an actionable cloud exit strategy can be created.
The Skaylink Advantage
As a partner of both NetApp and AWS, Skaylink has extensive experience in designing and implementing resilient, cost-effective and sovereign cloud solutions using FSxN. Whether you are planning a full migration to AWS, building a hybrid architecture or optimizing your existing file storage, we are here to guide you every step of the way.
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Are you ready to explore how FSxN can transform your cloud journey? Get in touch with us at Skaylink — we’d love to help you get the most out of ONTAP on AWS!
