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Choosing an Amazon FSx File System

Overview

Amazon FSx lets you choose between three widely-used file systems: NetApp ONTAP, Windows File Server, and Lustre. This choice is typically based on your familiarity with a given file system or by matching the file system's feature sets, performance profiles, and data management capabilities to the requirements of your workload.

Selecting a familiar file system

When moving existing applications and workloads to Amazon Web Services, a common consideration is to choose the file system that most closely matches your current storage technology so that you can maintain application compatibility and not change how you manage your data.

Current storage technology
Recommended Amazon FSx file system
Lustre or other parallel file systems
NetApp ONTAP or other NAS appliances
Microsoft Windows Server

Selecting a file system based on workload requirements

Amazon FSx file systems offer feature sets, performance profiles, and data management capabilities that support a wide variety of use cases. You can choose a file system that enables you to cost-effectively power your workload with the necessary reliability, functionality, performance, and security.

FSx for NetApp ONTAP
FSx for Windows File Server
FSx for Lustre
Performance and Scale

        

Latency
Sub-millisecond
Sub-millisecond
Sub-millisecond
Max. throughput per file system
2 GB/s*
2 GB/s*
100s of GB/s
Max. throughput available to a single client accessing a file system
2 GB/s*
2 GB/s*
Up to 12 GB/s
Max. number of concurrent client connections per file system

Thousands

Thousands
Thousands
Max. IOPS per file system
Hundreds of thousands
Hundreds of thousands
Millions
Adaptive Quality of Service controls

Maximum file system size

Virtually unlimited
(100s of PBs)

64 TiB; Extends to multiple PBs using DFS Namespaces

Virtually unlimited
(100s of PBs)

* 2 GB/s is baseline; you may see significantly higher performance due to automatic client/server caching and performance efficiencies from automatic data compression

        

Accessibility and Integrations

      

Client compatibility
Windows, Linux macOS
Windows, Linux, macOS
Linux
Protocol support
SMB 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 3.1.1
NFS 3, 4, 4.1
iSCSI (shared block storage)
SMB 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 3.1.1
Custom (POSIX-compliant) protocol optimized for performance
Amazon Compute
EC2 Windows, EC2 Linux, EKS Linux, ECS Windows, ECS Linux
EC2 Windows, EC2 Linux, ECS Windows
EC2 Linux, EKS Linux, ECS Linux
Automatic import/export of S3 data sets

    

   

Hybrid usage

         

On-premises access of FSx data
✓ Amazon Direct Connect
✓ Amazon Direct Connect, Amazon VPN
✓ Amazon Direct Connect, Amazon VPN
On-premises caching of FSx data
✓ NetApp Global File Cache, NetApp FlexCache
✓ Amazon FSx File Gateway
Backup and disaster recovery from on premises to Amazon Web Services
✓ NetApp SnapMirror
Support for compute burst to the cloud (use of FSx as an on- Amazon Web Services cache of data that resides on premises)
✓ NetApp FlexCache
Price/performance Optimization

      

Fast SSD storage option
Low-cost storage for cold, infrequently-accessed data
✓ Low-cost tier with cold data automatically cycled to it
✓  HDD storage option
✓ HDD storage option
Choice of throughput and IOPS levels
✓ Throughput and IOPS
✓  Throughput
✓  Throughput
User quotas
Data compression and/or compaction **
 ✓
Data deduplication **
** Applies to both primary storage and backups

      

Availability and Data Protection

     

Deployment options
Multi-AZ
Single-AZ and Multi-AZ
Single-AZ - Persistent or Scratch
Availability SLA
99.99%
99.99%
99.99%
Crash-consistent incremental backups
Inline instantaneous snapshots
Instant cloning
End-user file restore
Security and Compliance

     

Encryption-at-rest
 ✓ Amazon KMS
 ✓ Amazon KMS
  ✓ Amazon KMS
Encryption-in-transit
Network isolation
 ✓ Amazon VPC
 ✓ Amazon VPC
 ✓ Amazon VPC
Identity-based authentication for file system administration
✓ Amazon IAM
 ✓ Amazon IAM
✓ Amazon IAM
Active Directory support for file system access authentication and access control
File access auditing
Anti-virus scanning
Logging of API calls
 ✓ Amazon CloudTrail
 ✓ Amazon CloudTrail
✓ Amazon CloudTrail