GenAI was the dominant theme at AWS re:Invent 2023. It didn’t matter whom I spoke to—large enterprises, startups, Federal agencies—all organizations are exploring how they can extract relevant information from their data to gain business insights.
AI is disrupting everything—accelerating the pace of innovation and expanding potential rewards. An intelligent data infrastructure is foundational in turning this disruption into opportunity, enabling you to extract value from your data with integration to AI and ML services and simplifying data management, data protection, and operations.
NetApp had an incredible presence at re:Invent and we’re grateful for the thousands of attendees who stopped by to speak to our experts. We collaborated with AWS and VMware on two significant announcements and several minor but important enhancements on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.
FSx for ONTAP: Major announcements and new enhancements
- MAJOR! Scale-out, a 9X performance increase — A single Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file system can now deliver up to 36GB per second of throughput and 1.2 million input/output operations per second (IOPS)—a nine times improvement in performance from today’s 4GB per second throughput and 160,00 IOPS limit. Up to six pairs of file servers each providing up to 6GB per second throughput and 200,000 IOPS at sub-millisecond file operation latencies, operate as one single storage cluster. Compute applications benefit from the higher aggregate performance and a single petabyte scale namespace simplifying management of large datasets within a single storage system. Customers can easily lift and shift, extend or deploy new high-performance workloads on AWS, while leveraging AWS’s agility, scalability, and security—without having to modify their applications, tools, processes, or applications. High-performance workloads include electronic design automation (EDA), visual effects (VFX) and film editing, life sciences, seismic analysis, machine learning, and generative AI. Read the press release. Watch the newsreel video. Watch the Nick Howell, Global Field CTO at NetApp and Andy Crudge, Head of Product at AWS video.
- FlexGroup backups and restores — Up until now, our customers using the default backups or using AWS Backup could only back up data on FlexVol® volumes. A large majority of our customers who use FlexGroups will now be able to take incremental-forever backups of their entire data sets on both FlexVols and FlexGroups. FlexGroup backups work on existing systems with one HA pair as well as any newly deployed systems with more than 2 HA pairs.
- Shared VPC support for multi-AZ — Shared VPC for MAZ allows customers to deploy FSx for ONTAP in customer-designated VPCs while using a shared VPC for the network configuration (including the routing tables). While the users owning the customer VPCs may not have permissions to change the shared VPC, FSx for ONTAP will be able to change routing information as a part of failover management.
- VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS integration with FSx for ONTAP
- MAJOR! Next Generation M7i VMC instances with FSx for ONTAP: Building on the advantages of disaggregated architecture to further the architectural flexibility, cost efficiency and performance for VMC, VMware announced M7i instances to the VMC portfolio in addition to i3en and i4i instance types. The m7i.metal-24xl instance type is a compute-optimized instance without any local vSAN storage, hence enabling a disaggregated compute and storage architecture leveraging FSx for ONTAP as the external NFS datastore. With up to 48 physical cores and 348GiB of memory, the m7i instances when used with FSx for ONTAP will offer a great solution for use cases such as disaster recovery and backup infrastructure, compute-intensive AI and ML applications, and more. Expected to be available in VMware's Q4FY24, the diskless m7i instances will simplify the architecture and storage management by utilizing just one external storage type for virtual machines, provide more flexibility and control for customers to scale compute and storage independently, and improve overall TCO. Watch the video.
- Application-consistent backups of Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases running on VMware Cloud—all within NetApp® SnapCenter®. Irrespective of the size of production databases, customers can take application-consistent snapshots with no performance impact to business-critical applications. Based on the tiering policy, these snapshots can be tiered to FSx for ONTAP capacity pool for lowering overall storage costs. In addition, using SnapVault®, customers could back up and retain these snapshots to another FSx for ONTAP file system running in a different AWS region. Read the blog.
- VPC Peering for VMware Cloud on AWS: To reduce the overall cost of VMware Cloud on AWS with FSx for ONTAP, in November, VMware released VPC Peering network connectivity option to connect SDDC clusters to FSx for ONTAP Single-AZ configurations. Customers can now utilize the VPC Peering connectivity option that maintains performance and reduces overall costs incurred due to vTGW. Read the GA announcement blog.
- BlueXP disaster recovery: In October, we announced a public preview of NetApp BlueXP™ disaster recovery. This DRaaS offering provides low-cost disaster protection for VMware workloads from on-premises NetApp ONTAP® environments to VMware Cloud when using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. We are looking forward to bringing it to our customers’ hands as a generally available service soon. Meanwhile, access to the public preview can be requested here.
- MAJOR! Next Generation M7i VMC instances with FSx for ONTAP: Building on the advantages of disaggregated architecture to further the architectural flexibility, cost efficiency and performance for VMC, VMware announced M7i instances to the VMC portfolio in addition to i3en and i4i instance types. The m7i.metal-24xl instance type is a compute-optimized instance without any local vSAN storage, hence enabling a disaggregated compute and storage architecture leveraging FSx for ONTAP as the external NFS datastore. With up to 48 physical cores and 348GiB of memory, the m7i instances when used with FSx for ONTAP will offer a great solution for use cases such as disaster recovery and backup infrastructure, compute-intensive AI and ML applications, and more. Expected to be available in VMware's Q4FY24, the diskless m7i instances will simplify the architecture and storage management by utilizing just one external storage type for virtual machines, provide more flexibility and control for customers to scale compute and storage independently, and improve overall TCO. Watch the video.
Read about all the FSx for ONTAP announcements, including enhancements for Amazon EKS, here.
On-demand breakout sessions
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP was featured in several breakout sessions. Here are some of the breakout session recordings.
- Breakout Session: CPG101 | How adidas revolutionizes digital systems to fuel a thriving business
- Breakout Session: ENT210 | Accelerating the migration of large-scale SAP systems to AWS
- Breakout Session: MFG106 | Product innovation and customer engagement with Ferrari and Autodesk
- Breakout Session: STG209 | Network-attached storage in the cloud with Amazon FSx
- Breakout Session: STG219 | What’s new with AWS file storage
- Breakout Session: STG220-S | FSx for ONTAP: Enterprise-grade unified storage for any application (sponsored by NetApp)
- Breakout Session: STG229 | Deep dive on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP scale-out file systems
- Breakout Session: STG341 | Meet performance demands for your business-critical applications
- Lightning Talk: SMB210 | Migrate your data to AWS seamlessly with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
Sincere thanks to all of you who stopped by our booth to say hello. Find more details about NetApp at AWS re:Invent 2023 or book a meeting with an AWS cloud specialist.
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