Accelerate storage migration planning with AWS Transform assessments

Migration assessments empower organizations to understand their on-premises infrastructure footprint and evaluate migration and modernization opportunities in the cloud. These assessments instill confidence in decision-makers and help organizations optimize their infrastructure, potentially reducing costs by up to 60% (Bain & Company, “Rightsizing your way to the cloud“). 

AWS Transform assessments help eliminate the guesswork in the journey to the cloud. AWS Transform leverages AI to generate data-driven Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) business cases, streamlining the transformation planning. The assessment supports multiple data formats, including NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights (DII) exports, AWS Transform custom data format, Migration Evaluator (ME), and RVTools formats, making it easier than ever to begin the migration journey. AWS Transform assessments also determine eligibility for AWS programs and incentives, including the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).

Today, AWS Transform assessments expanded its capabilities by introducing comprehensive storage workload analysis. This new feature helps organizations analyze their on-premises detached storage infrastructure additional to compute. The enhanced storage assessment capability evaluates a wide range of storage infrastructures, including Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), file servers, object storage, and virtual environments. AWS Transform provides detailed migration recommendations by mapping workloads to AWS storage services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for object storage, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for block storage, and Amazon FSx for specialized file systems. With storage accounting for up to 45% of total migration opportunities, these assessments are a crucial initial step in any organization’s migration journey, helping reduce costs and accelerate planning to achieve migration objectives faster.

Create your own combined compute and storage assessment with AWS Transform assessment

Starting an assessment is straightforward. Interact with the AWS Transform chat to start an assessment job as seen in Figure 1. After setting up the job, simply download and populate the template with server and storage information in the appropriate tabs (Servers, File Storage, Block Storage, and Object Storage), or use files from other supported sources (NetApp DII, ME, or RVTools).

Figure 1: Screenshot of AWS Transform assessment job kickoff

Upload this data as seen in Figure 2. After uploading your data and selecting your target AWS region, AWS Transform analyzes the compute and storage information to recommend right-sized, cost-optimized AWS target services. The solution delivers a comprehensive analysis of the on-premises infrastructure, providing a detailed TCO comparison between current and AWS environments. It also provides performance and cost optimization recommendations to help find the best-fit, lowest-cost target services in AWS.

Figure 2: Screenshot of AWS Transform file upload

The resulting business case highlights key migration and optimization opportunities and benefits, providing an executive summary of discovered servers, storage, and recommended AWS services. The analysis includes insights about total cost of ownership (TCO) for each target, and suggested next steps based on the provided data. To help understand the assessment results, users interact with the AWS Transform AI agent to gain deeper insights, clarify why it recommended specific AWS services, understand the content included in the assessment, or receive additional guidance on recommended next steps.

Upon completing the review in the AWS Transform web experience, users can export a comprehensive report in PDF format, a business case presentation in PPT format, and an export of discovered data with target mappings in XLS format. These materials help facilitate discussions with key stakeholders and support informed decision-making throughout the migration journey. Users can also revisit existing assessments to ask additional questions or initiate new assessment jobs for additional inventory analysis, ensuring continuous optimization of the migration strategy.

Whether companies are just beginning to explore cloud migration or looking to optimize their existing migration plans, AWS Transform assessments provide a comprehensive infrastructure analysis needed to make informed decisions about the organization’s cloud journey. 

Getting started

To get started, visit the AWS Transform web experience or review our documentation to learn more.