NetApp announced that Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now a supported external storage option for Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon EVS, now generally available, is a new AWS service that allows users to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly within their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), alongside other applications. With Amazon EVS, organisations can quickly migrate VMware workloads to AWS to seamlessly extend and expand their VMware environments and unlock business agility and transformation.
This integration with Amazon EVS combines NetApp’s proven, secure data management and protection capabilities with AWS’s scale, resilience, and performance, allowing customers to simplify and accelerate their AWS migration without re-platforming or re-factoring their existing applications or changing their data management workflows.
Migrating mission-critical workloads to the cloud can help businesses drive transformation by eliminating ageing infrastructure, reducing operational costs, and meeting critical business timelines, but they need an effective data strategy to avoid introducing new challenges such as unexpected costs, sprawling IT environments, and fragmented services. As the only enterprise storage solution provider with a first-party data storage service natively built on AWS, NetApp is uniquely equipped to help customers accelerate modern workloads in the cloud by offering enterprise storage solutions natively built on AWS. Customers have been able to reduce costs by 50 per cent after adopting Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Using FSx for ONTAP to migrate and manage their VMware environments enables customers to leverage Intelligent Data Infrastructure to improve migration planning and decrease total cost of ownership with built-in data management capabilities.
“Customers utilising Amazon EVS with FSx for ONTAP can now enjoy the same data efficiency, protection, and automation they trust on-premises,” said Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp. “Through our collaboration with AWS, we’re making it easier to move critical workloads to the cloud and manage them at scale.”
To better support customers as they manage advanced workloads in the cloud, NetApp has released capabilities including:
- Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP support for Amazon EVS: Amazon EVS, the new self-managed cloud solution for VMware from AWS, is now generally available, and FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a supported storage option. Amazon EVS automates and simplifies deployments and provides a ready-to-use VCF environment on AWS. This allows VMware administrators to quickly migrate VMware-based virtual machines to AWS using the same VCF software and tools they already use in their on-premises environment. Using FSx for ONTAP as external storage for the Amazon EVS environment reduces overhead by providing advanced data management and protection functionality, reducing total cost of ownership and increasing cyber resiliency.
- Migration advisor for Amazon EVS workloads: The migration advisor feature of BlueXP workload factory for AWS now supports Amazon EVS workloads, helping simplify and speed up migration processes. Customers can now automate the discovery of on-premises virtual machines, provisioning of FSx for ONTAP, and placement of datastores in Amazon EVS.
- Expanded VMware disaster recovery support in BlueXP: BlueXP disaster recovery for VMware now integrates with Amazon EVS, leveraging FSx for ONTAP storage as a reliable disaster recovery target. Supported datastore options include NFS (file-based) and VMFS (block-based) via the iSCSI protocol, ensuring versatile and efficient disaster recovery solutions.
- Enhanced ransomware protection features: Further enabling customers to protect Amazon EVS workloads, NetApp ONTAP autonomous ransomware protection (ARP) for FSx for ONTAP is used to detect and respond to ransomware events in real time. Additionally, NetApp BlueXP ransomware protection service supports FSx for ONTAP to help customers with comprehensive orchestration of their defense against ransomware events. Enabling these features to support workloads natively in AWS helps protect customer data and minimise downtime by proactively detecting ransomware at the storage layer across the hybrid cloud.
Xtravirt, a NetApp Preferred Partner and an AWS partner, believes these latest announcements will come as good news to businesses looking to migrate VMware workloads to public cloud. “Enabling support for FSx for ONTAP on Amazon EVS gives customers more granular control over the data powering some of their most important workloads,” said Robin Gardner, CCO at Xtravirt. “Customers will be able access NetApp’s advanced data management functionality to reduce the overhead of managing virtual environments and more efficiently and securely manage hybrid deployments.”
No ransomware detection or prevention system can completely guarantee safety from a ransomware attack. Although it’s possible that an attack might go undetected, NetApp technology acts as an important additional layer of defence.
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