Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

By providing fully managed storage built on Windows Server, Amazon FSx provides a rich set of administrative features that include end-user file restore, user quotas, and Access Control Lists (ACLs). With Windows Server's native support for the SMB protocol, Windows-based applications have access to fully compatible shared file storage. Since SMB file shares can also be accessed from Linux and MacOS, any application or user can access the storage regardless of operating system.

You no longer have to worry about setting up and provisioning file servers and storage volumes, replicating data, installing file server software updates and patches, managing failover and failback, and manually performing backups. In minutes, you can easily create a fully managed file system in a single AZ or across multiple AZs using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon CLI, or Amazon SDK. Amazon FSx also provides automatic durable backups. Migrating file data into Amazon FSx is simple and fast with Amazon DataSync.

With Amazon FSx, you get highly available and durable file storage. Data deduplication enables you to optimize costs even further by removing redundant data. You can increase your file system storage and scale throughput capacity at any time, making it easy to respond to changing business needs. There are no upfront costs or licensing fees.

With Amazon FSx, you get the throughput, IOPS per file system, and consistent sub-millisecond latencies that your Windows workloads expect. To meet the price and performance needs of your workloads, Amazon FSx provides SSD and HDD storage options, and enables you to select a throughput level for your file system and change it at any time. Using DFS Namespaces, you can scale performance up to tens of gigabytes per second of throughput, with millions of IOPS, across hundreds of petabytes of data.

Amazon FSx provides multiple levels of security and compliance to help ensure your data is protected. Amazon FSx automatically encrypts your data at-rest and in-transit. Amazon FSx is designed to meet the highest security standards and it has been assessed to comply with ISO, PCI-DSS, and SOC certifications. You can monitor and log API calls using Amazon CloudTrail and audit end user actions on files and folders using Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. To meet your data protection requirements, you can use Amazon Backup for centralized backup and compliance management for your Amazon FSx file systems.

Amazon FSx provides multiple levels of security and compliance to help ensure your data is protected. Amazon FSx automatically encrypts your data at-rest and in-transit. Amazon FSx is designed to meet the high security standards. Integration with Amazon CloudTrail monitors and logs your API calls letting you see actions taken by users on your Amazon FSx resources. To control user access, Amazon FSx integrates with your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as well as with Amazon Web Services  Microsoft Managed AD.

Many organizations have home directories and team shares. These organizations typically need shared access to common data sets with hundreds or thousands of users. You can use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to create a file system that is accessible by up to hundreds of thousands of users, and establish permissions at the file or folder level. You can easily move existing home directory file shares to Amazon FSx using Amazon DataSync.

Many Windows-based business-critical applications and workloads, such as ERP, CRM, and custom applications, require shared file storage provided by Windows-based file systems (NTFS) and use the SMB protocol. Amazon FSx is built on Windows Server and provides you with the compatible Windows features and performance that your applications require from a file system. By providing fully managed Windows file storage with features like Microsoft AD integration and automatic backups, you can easily migrate your file-based applications to Amazon Web Services Cloud.

SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances have been traditionally difficult to deploy and manage. With the multi-AZ file system option, Amazon FSx provides fully managed file storage that enables the high availability and durability that is required to run business-critical Microsoft SQL Server database workloads without the need for Enterprise licenses. Amazon FSx automatically handles the data replication and failover, simplifying shared storage to host your database deployments while reducing cost.

Media workflows like media transcoding, processing, and streaming often depend on shared file storage with consistent performance. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides you with a shared file system with the high throughput and low latencies these applications and workloads require.

Content management and web serving applications, like Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and WordPress, store and serve files for websites and internal portals. These applications use shared file storage because multiple web or content servers typically need access to the same files. Amazon FSx is ideal for these workloads because it provides a file system that can be accessed across thousands of instances simultaneously.

Data analytics applications consume a high volume of data from a variety of sources, and typically require access from tens to thousands of compute instances. By providing scalable file systems with high throughput and low latencies, Amazon FSx enables you to run data-intensive analytics workloads including business intelligence and data visualization applications.