Jointly engineered with VMware and AWS, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP enables high-performance NFS datastores to be used by VMware Cloud on AWS clusters in a software-defined data center (SDDC). By decoupling storage from compute, customers can easily scale storage as needed without having to scale compute, resulting in TCO savings of 25% to 50%. Additionally, customers gain the benefits from using a high-performance storage solution, integrated data protection features, built in disaster recovery using SnapMirror and cost optimization using data tiering, deduplication and compression features.
To provide supplemental datastores for VMware SDDC clusters, FSx for ONTAP can be deployed with two levels of availability:
1. Multi-Availability Zone (MAZ) configuration providing customers with highly available and durable storage across two Availability Zones.
2. Single Availability Zone (SAZ) configuration that provides a lower cost option that provides high availability within a single AWS Availability Zone.
Up until now, both configurations required a VMware managed Transit Gateway (vTGW) for network connectivity between SDDC clusters and FSx for ONTAP. While vTGW enabled a robust connectivity option to bridge SDDC and FSx for ONTAP networks, it also added cost for the egress traffic that passed through the transit gateway.
To reduce the overall cost of the solution, VMware has now made the VPC Peering network connectivity option generally available to connect SDDC clusters to FSx for ONTAP SAZ configurations. Starting today, customers can utilize the VPC Peering connectivity option that maintains performance and reduces overall cost incurred due to vTGW. It's worth noting that vTGW is still required to connect to FSx for ONTAP MAZ filesystems.
We are excited that the new VPC Peering option is now generally available from VMware. You can calculate the additional savings potential utilizing the VMC and FSx for ONTAP TCO tool available at https://bluexp.netapp.com/vmc-aws-fsx-ontap/roi.
For more information on how VPC Peering works with FSx for ONTAP Single AZ configurations, please refer to VMware's blog: https://vmc.techzone.vmware.com/resource/feature-brief-vpc-peering and release notes for SDDC version 1.24 https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-on-AWS/services/rn/vmware-cloud-on-aws-release-notes/index.html