From June through August 2025, NetApp and AWS delivered a series of enhancements to NetApp® Workload Factory that further simplify deployment, improve resilience, and automate storage operations on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP workloads.
Here’s what’s new in Workload Factory for you to catch up on:
- New AI-powered interface updates
- Storage workload updates
- Database workload updates
- GenAI workload updates
- Explore these enhancements in Workload Factory now
New AI-powered interface updates
ONTAP CLI error insights built into CloudShell
The latest update to Workload Factory operability with CloudShell introduces AI-based error responses for ONTAP® CLI commands. This feature makes ONTAP CLI troubleshooting faster and more intuitive.
Now, when an ONTAP CLI command fails, CloudShell uses an AI trained on ONTAP 9 documentation and NetApp knowledge bases to provide a plain-language explanation of what went wrong and recommended next steps.
This feature provides:
- Contextual error analysis: Understand what failed and why it failed.
- Guided remediation: Get clear, actionable suggestions for fixing the issue.
- Time-saving support: Skip the documentation hunt or support calls for common errors.
Ask me answers to your FSx for ONTAP and Workload Factory questions
Workload Factory now includes Ask me, a GenAI-powered assistant that helps you get quick, accurate answers about FSx for ONTAP and Workload Factory. Whether you're deploying a new workload or managing an existing one, Ask me provides context-rich responses that guide you through technical decisions and configuration steps.
Unlike generic chat tools, “Ask me” draws from curated NetApp and AWS resources—including documentation, blogs, and videos—quickly providing answers that are both easy to understand and trustworthy.
Ask me responses are presented with source links where you can find in-depth details.
Help us improve Ask me with in-app feedback
The GenAI-powered Ask me assistant features a built-in feedback form that will make it easier for users to help refine the tool's accuracy and relevance.
When you receive an answer from Ask me, you can rate the response and submit written feedback. This direct input loop supports continuous improvement.
Storage workload updates
Get a well-architected view of your current storage infrastructure
Staying aligned with NetApp and AWS well-architected storage principles for reliability, security, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost optimization is a continuous effort. The new Well-Architected status dashboard provides a centralized, actionable view of how your storage deployment measures up.
This dashboard visualizes your current status and analyzes live deployment settings against AWS and NetApp best practices, highlighting areas that are suboptimal and suggesting tailored remediation actions.
The well-architected status dashboard offers:
- Pillar-based evaluation: See how your environment ranks across the AWS Well-Architected pillars.
- Actionable insights: Get clear remediation suggestions.
- Automated fixes (coming soon): This dashboard will later feature the ability to carry out remediations directly from the dashboard.
Read more in One-click alignment to AWS Well-Architected storage recommendations with Workload Factory.
Activate defense with Autonomous Ransomware Protection
Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) is a unique, AI-powered ONTAP feature new to FSx for ONTAP. Workload Factory makes it easy to set it up and get started.
With this update, users can activate ARP directly from the storage management screen, view the protection status, and download post-attack analysis reports without needing ONTAP CLI access.
ARP continuously learns storage and user behavior, watching for anomalies that may indicate a ransomware attack. When a threat is suspected, the system takes immediate action by creating immutable NetApp Snapshot™ copies and generating a detailed forensic report.
- Simple activation: Turn on ARP from the Workload Factory dashboard—no command-line steps required.
- At-a-glance status: Instantly view protection status for each volume.
- Downloadable reports: Access analysis documents to support audit, regulatory, or internal investigations.
This streamlined experience brings enterprise-grade ransomware protection into everyday workflows, making it easier for admins to defend critical data with minimal operational overhead.
Workload Factory now supports Gen-2 FSx for ONTAP deployments
Workload Factory has been upgraded to fully support second-generation (Gen-2) FSx for ONTAP file systems, bringing greater performance, scale, and resiliency to automated deployment workflows.
Gen 2 delivers enhanced capabilities across the board, including higher throughput, increased IOPS, and improved fault tolerance. With this update, Workload Factory users can create, manage, and optimize Gen-2 file systems just as easily as Gen-1, with full integration into design wizards, cost calculators, and operational tools.
What Gen-2 support in Workload Factory means:
- Seamless provisioning: Use Workload Factory to create deployments of up to 12 highly-available (HA) pairs, to provide as much as 1 PiB of provisioned SSD storage with 72 GBps of throughput and 2.4 million IOPS.
- Optimized recommendations: Resource sizing and layout suggestions are tailored to Gen-2 performance profiles.
- Wider compatibility: Supports use cases requiring high throughput, dense IOPS, or multi-AZ fault domains.
Read more about Workload Factory support for Gen-2 FSx for ONTAP.
Simplify capacity management with automatic volume growth
Running out of space in a critical volume can disrupt workloads and create urgent fire drills for administrators. To avoid these situations, Workload Factory now offers a volume autogrow option when provisioning FSx for ONTAP volumes.
With the volume autogrow option enabled, customers can set a maximum capacity that is larger than the provisioned capacity for a volume. The volume capacity will increase up to this limit, giving administrators time to adjust long-term capacity plans without impacting ongoing operations.
Read more about the volume autogrow option.
Keep FlexGroup and FlexVol volumes balanced for optimized performance
Workload Factory now gives users a way to keep FSx for ONTAP running at optimized performance with a rebalance option for FlexGroup and FlexVol volumes.
FlexVol volumes are the standard FSx for ONTAP volumes. FlexGroup volumes distribute data across multiple FlexVol volumes, making it possible to reach the highest possible levels of capacity and performance with FSx for ONTAP. In both cases, as data is accessed over time, it can become unevenly distributed across volumes, causing performance to dip or become inconsistent.
Workload Factory now includes a balance status widget for FlexVol and FlexGroup volumes that simplifies this challenge. Instead of manually monitoring and rebalancing volumes—which is complex and time-consuming—admins can now use Workload Factory to instantly see the balance status of a FlexGroup or FlexVol volume and trigger a rebalance operation when needed.
By surfacing clear indicators of uneven capacity and providing a simple way to rebalance, Workload Factory helps your workloads continue to perform their best.
Read more about how Workload Factory rebalancing for FlexVol volumes.
Restore seamlessly with proactive volume space checks
Workload Factory now adds an automated free-space validation check before restoring Snapshot copies to FSx for ONTAP volumes.
This enhancement checks whether the destination volume has enough available capacity to accommodate the full restore. If not, the system halts the restore and flags the issue, eliminating mid-process failures and wasted time.
Accelerate deployment with replication use case templates
Replication strategies vary depending on whether you’re planning for disaster recovery (DR), migration, or data archiving. To simplify this, Workload Factory now includes replication use case templates that provide prebuilt, best-practice configurations for these common scenarios.
Instead of building replication policies from scratch, administrators can save time by selecting from several prebuilt use cases in Workload Factory:
- Migration: Move data between environments efficiently with policies optimized for large-scale transfers.
- Warm DR: Protect business-critical workloads with cross-region or cross-AZ replication for business continuity.
- Archive or Cold DR: Replicate data to the target for long-term retention or less-urgent recovery priorities.
- Other: Custom replication strategies.
Maintain peak performance with cascading volume replication
Workload Factory now supports cascading volume replication, a feature that reduces the load on the FSx for ONTAP production environment.
Instead of replicating from the source volume, cascading replication will use a secondary copy, such as the DR volume, as the basis of additional volume replications. This is a better practice since this approach doesn’t add load on the primary system.
Benefits of cascading replication include:
- Supporting performance: Offloading replication tasks from the primary system reduces strain.
- Reduced manual overhead: Save the time and effort of manually configuring a similar process using the ONTAP CLI.
Updated Storage dashboard features
Over the last few months, there have been several upgrades and additions to the Storage dashboard:
Smarter user interface
The updated Storage dashboard in Workload Factory has a cleaner, smarter interface designed to give you deeper insight—and more control—over your FSx for ONTAP file systems.
This isn’t just a cosmetic upgrade. The new dashboard provides a quick view of any outstanding configuration issues, providing a capacity overview and the new AWS Well-Architected alignment status. These help customers make faster, smarter decisions across multiple deployments, surfacing the most important data front and center.
The Volumes tab offers a clearer view
The Volumes tab in Workload Factory now surfaces the essentials up front: a concise summary of each volume’s SSD capacity, total capacity pool, and ARP status.
What’s new:
- Capacity at a glance: See SSD capacity and capacity-pool usage per volume, plus overall distribution.
- Protection status: Instantly check ARP status across volumes and identify any that aren’t protected (important for older volumes created before ARP launched).
- Faster triage: A single view highlights volumes at risk of reaching maximum SSD capacity so you can act early.
Gain sharper visibility with Storage dashboard improvements
The Storage dashboard in Workload Factory has been refreshed to deliver clearer, more actionable insights into FSx for ONTAP environments.
The new cards on the dashboard include:
- Capacity visualization: Totaling your overall capacity with a new button to adjust.
- Storage savings opportunities: Identifies assets that can be optimized to reduce spending.
- Protection awareness: Visualizes the data protection and security features enabled for the system, with buttons to make adjustments.
Database workload updates
New recommendations enhance SQL Server resiliency
Workload Factory now offers optimization recommendations specifically designed for deployed SQL Server workloads.
The resiliency optimization screen offers the following recommendations for FSx for ONTAP deployments supporting SQL Server:
- Snapshot policy: Checks that the volumes have a Snapshot policy in place.
- FSx for ONTAP backups: Checks that automatic backups are configured.
- Cross-Region replication: Checks that there is a DR copy of the FSx for ONTAP that supports the SQL Server database located in a separate AWS Region.
Simplify management with bulk registration of database instances
Enterprises normally operate dozens or even hundreds of database instances across projects, regions, and environments. To streamline operations, Workload Factory now supports registering multiple database instances at once for FSx for ONTAP–backed workloads.
Instead of onboarding instances one by one, administrators can bulk-register databases and then centralize visibility and control of them from a single dashboard. This makes it easier to track usage, apply consistent policies, and optimize storage across the entire database estate.
Read more about registering multiple database instances.
Monitor health with database resource performance graphs
Workload Factory now provides database resource performance graphs, giving administrators real-time visibility into how FSx for ONTAP supports their database estate.
These graphs display key metrics for IOPS, throughput, latency, and CPU utilization. The result is an overview that helps database and storage teams pinpoint performance trends and troubleshoot issues faster.
GenAI workload updates
Connector creation for FSx for ONTAP and Amazon Q Business
Workload Factory now gives you an easy way to create a Connector between Amazon Q Business and FSx for ONTAP. This can bring selected FSx for ONTAP volume data directly into the AWS generative AI assistant for use in generating contextual responses based on your own storage metadata and structure.
- Feeding data: Data from FSx for ONTAP volumes is sent to Amazon Q Business, keeping the data up to date over time.
- Upholding security: The data fed to Amazon Q Business retains user permissions to maintain secure access.
- Data guardrails feature: Using NetApp Classification, personally identifiable information (PII) is removed from the data before it is sent to Amazon Q Business.
Explore these enhancements in Workload Factory now
To explore these new features, visit the Workload Factory console and navigate to the updated UI tabs and tools. These updates aim to cut deployment time, improve data protection, and bring greater automation to managing storage on AWS.
