Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

AWS's fully managed shared file storage service built on NetApp's ONTAP operating system, delivering enterprise storage features over NFS, SMB, and iSCSI simultaneously from a single file system. Unlike EFS, which supports NFS-only Linux workloads and scales automatically, or FSx for Windows File Server, which targets SMB-only Windows environments, FSx for NetApp ONTAP supports all three protocols at once — making it the right choice for mixed Windows-and-Linux workloads, Oracle databases, SAP HANA, VMware Cloud on AWS, and any application that already relies on ONTAP data management. It deploys in a Multi-AZ configuration with an active standby file server for high availability, and brings the full ONTAP feature set to AWS: instant volume cloning, application-consistent snapshots, SnapMirror cross-region replication, thin provisioning, and storage efficiency (deduplication, compression). Capacity and throughput are independently adjustable without downtime, and the service integrates with AWS Backup for policy-driven backup. The closest equivalents on other clouds are Azure NetApp Files and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, both of which run the same ONTAP software on their respective clouds. OCI has no native ONTAP-based offering, but Cloud Volumes ONTAP by NetApp is available via OCI Marketplace for organisations that need ONTAP on OCI. Use FSx for NetApp ONTAP when you need ONTAP-specific data management, multi-protocol access, or are migrating on-premises NetApp storage to AWS; use EFS when you need a simple, automatically scaling NFS share for Linux workloads.

A financial services firm running Oracle RAC on EC2 migrates from on-premises NetApp storage to FSx for NetApp ONTAP. The iSCSI protocol provides block-level access for Oracle's redo logs, NFS mounts serve the data files, and SnapMirror replicates the file system to a second AWS region every hour for disaster recovery — all using the same ONTAP tools and procedures the storage team already knows.