Running a large database comes with its own set of challenges, especially if you’re self managing that database and its underlying storage.
When you run your own database, you’re responsible for configuring the performance, availability, and resilience levels that your database needs. The challenge is how to keep the costs of doing all that under control.
This post explores some of the cost challenges in running a self-managed database and shows how Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP can help you reduce database costs by up to 50%—without compromising performance or reliability.
Read on as we cover:
- Self-managed AWS database cost challenges
- FSx for ONTAP reduces AWS database costs
- The FSx for ONTAP cost advantage
- Arcesium reduced its database costs with FSx for ONTAP
- It’s time to cut the costs of self-managed databases on AWS
Self-managed AWS database cost challenges
There are several cost-related aspects to consider when running a self-managed database:
- Cloning data will clone your costs. Consider data cloning, for starters. You’re often required to create multiple copies of data during several points in the data lifecycle—for example, to refresh your database, to create a new test environment, or even as a backup before rolling out a change. Depending on your storage service, these extra copies or snapshots may not be all that space efficient. They may simply be full copies of the entire dataset. That means consuming twice as much storage space for each copy—something that your monthly storage bills will reflect.
- Data protection doesn’t protect your wallet. Similar to the costs for cloning data, the data copies that serve regular backup and disaster recovery (DR) purposes can also be major cost concerns. Organizations with a defined business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy for their databases have to deal with the problem of redundant storage consumption associated with DR and backup. Due to obvious reasons, you can’t do away with these additional data copies—data protection is a must.
- You can’t afford to trade off on performance. Self-managed databases also come with the additional baggage of configuring consistent storage performance while ensuring that you are not overpaying for it. For example, you don’t need to pay for higher IOPS (input/output operations per second) in a lower tier environment or for data that doesn’t demand high performance. Ensuring low latencies with high performance storage can turn out to be complex and costly.
FSx for ONTAP reduces AWS database costs
With FSx for ONTAP, AWS and NetApp have partnered to provide a fully managed AWS storage service with the enterprise-grade data management features of NetApp® ONTAP® technology. These capabilities can help customers optimize the performance, durability, and costs of their deployments.
FSx for ONTAP can reduce the costs of managing your database on AWS by 50%. Note that’s not just the storage savings—that’s the overall reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) of running a database on AWS. Here’s how it works.
The FSx for ONTAP cost advantage
FSx for ONTAP is delivered as a native, fully managed AWS service with capabilities that bring down the cost for self-managed database deployments:
- Storage efficiencies optimize footprint and usage. FSx for ONTAP is cost-optimized and supports the full suite of ONTAP storage efficiency technologies. Thin provisioning, data compression, deduplication, and compaction help bring down the overall storage footprint. And as your overall data consumption shrinks, so do your storage costs. Data tiering allows infrequently used data to be tiered from high-performance SSD storage to less-expensive capacity storage, optimizing the costs for storing it.
- Highly efficient snapshot copies. FSx for ONTAP uses NetApp Snapshot™ technology to create point-in-time, read-only copies. These snapshot copies are based on pointers to the original data, so there is no actual data movement and they don’t consume space, lowering costs significantly. In addition, these copies are updated incrementally, only adding capacity for changed or added data since the previous Snapshot was taken.
- Lightweight clone copies don’t duplicate your database storage costs. FSx for ONTAP supports thin cloning using NetApp FlexClone® technology, which can be used to create writable, lightweight copies of your database. Because these clones are based on lightweight NetApp Snapshot copies, no actual data is moved to create a copy of the data, making the creation process instantaneous, no matter the size of the source data. The creation process also has no impact on your database’s performance and the clones consume near-zero additional capacity or costs. That means they don’t rack up the charges that full copies of your database would incur.
Since the clones are fully writable, they can perform just like real copies of data. For developers—whose tests can sometimes require hundreds of copies of the dataset—the potential savings are massive.
For example, an organization that needs to spin up 50 environments for testing will usually need to pay for 50 times the original capacity in use. With FSx for ONTAP, the copies consume just a fraction of additional storage capacity.
FSx for ONTAP cloning doesn’t just bring down the costs for self-managed databases, it also helps shorten and reduce the costs of the development cycle. Since clone copies are created instantly, you don’t have the interminable wait times for additional environments to spin up or databases to refresh. That cuts the associated compute usage and associated costs during that time. Thus the overall development cost is reduced and speeds up the time to market.
To learn more about NetApp ONTAP cloning technology visit our Speed up development and cut costs with FSx for ONTAP thin cloning post.
- Reduce overall compute costs. Typically, large scale database deployments lead to high costs, as you’ll need large instances to handle the large volume of storage traffic. Unlike other storage services, the database server uses network bandwidth to access FSx for ONTAP storage, which provides higher throughput levels. That means you can utilize lower-cost Amazon instance types to support your database performance.
- Configurable performance so you don’t overpay. FSx for ONTAP provides the flexibility to fine tune performance per workload requirements. You can configure the throughput and IOPS of the service to save costs and scale it up or down on demand at any time.
- Efficient copies reduce DR costs. FSx for ONTAP uses NetApp SnapMirror® replication technology for theDR environment synchronization. SnapMirror replicates snapshot copies of your data, which can be located in different AWS regions. Since NetApp Snapshot copies are incremental and inherently cost and space efficient, the overall storage and transfer costs associated with DR is minimal, failover between regions doesn’t impact database performance, and recovery time SLAs are kept to the minimum—your recovery point objective (RPO) can be as low as 5 minutes and your recovery time objective (RTO) in the single digits.
- Spend less on database licenses. Usually, to get high availability (HA) and DR capabilities for your SQL deployments, you would need to use the MS SQL Always-on Availability Group (AOAG) feature, which requires using an SQL Server Enterprise license. With FSx for ONTAP you can get the same level of resiliency and protection as AOAG with high-availability cluster configurations such as Microsoft SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) or Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), while using the less-expensive Standard license.
This is possible thanks to two capabilities. First, with FSx for ONTAP you can share block storage on AWS across Availability Zones (AZs). That allows the two highly available (HA) instances to access the same data across AZs—a unique, cost-saving capability that no other storage service provides. Second, FSx for ONTAP allows the highly efficient data replication across regions for DR (powered by SnapMirror).
Using shared blocks across AZs provides compute redundancy, and cross-region DR provides data redundancy. Combined, FSx for ONTAP gives you the same SLAs as AOAG with the FCI architecture, all while using the less-expensive Standard license for SQL Server.
That means with FSx for ONTAP, you get the highest level of resiliency and protection for your database, in the most cost-optimized way possible.
MS SQL Always-On FCI architecture, with DR, using FSx for ONTAP
- Backup your database faster and at lower cost. NetApp Snapshot copies facilitate highly durable point-in-time backups of your databases at the block level. Since Snapshot copies are lightweight and update incrementally, you avoid the costs of multiple full copies of data, which is usually the case for traditional backup solutions.
All these features combine to shrink the storage footprint and lower costs significantly. To learn more about NetApp ONTAP storage efficiency features visit our Optimize your storage costs with FSx for ONTAP post.
Arcesium reduced its database costs with FSx for ONTAP
To see how FSx for ONTAP can lower the costs of running a self-managed database, take a look at how it worked for Arcesium.
Arcesium is a provider of advanced data, operations, and analytics solutions for the financial services industry. They wanted to reduce the time and costs associated with the refresh cycles for their large, multi-terabyte database estate, while maintaining a consistent point-in-time view across several different databases.
Using FSx for ONTAP made that possible, and delivered cost-cutting benefits:
- Lightweight cloning cuts the time and costs to refresh databases. Thin cloning technology enabled Arcesium to create near-instantaneous, storage-efficient database copies during refresh cycles. That led to a huge 80% refresh cost reduction.
- Storage efficiencies shrank the overall data footprint by 53%. Thanks to the built-in FSx for ONTAP storage efficiencies the data footprint was reduced significantly. That helped Arcesium reduce their overall storage costs by 46%.
- Faster, more flexible Snapshot copies reduced data protection costs. Arcesium saw a five-fold improvement in the speed of creating point-in-time database recovery points using NetApp Snapshot technology. FSx for ONTAP also made it possible to leverage the DR environment for other uses.
It’s time to cut the costs of self-managed databases on AWS
FSx for ONTAP packs a punch when it comes to enterprise class data management features required while hosting a self-managed database in AWS, without burning a hole in your wallet. The features of the service such as NetApp Snapshot copies, thin clones, efficient data replication along with its inherent storage efficiency features can significantly bring down your overall database costs.
Inflated bills should not hold you back from deploying efficient self-managed database architectures. Use FSx for ONTAP to achieve cost effective database deployments in AWS.
