Migrating SAS grid to the cloud: How Amazon FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering delivers low cost, high performance, storage

For nearly two decades, organizations across healthcare, drug discovery, and financial services have relied on SAS Grid to power their most critical analytics workloads. SAS Grid (formally known as SAS Grid Manager) is an enterprise software platform developed by SAS Institute that distributes and manages large-scale analytical workloads across a cluster of servers. It acts as a job scheduler and resource manager that enables parallel processing, load balancing, and high availability. Think of it as an air traffic controller at a busy airport: instead of all planes (jobs) trying to land on one runway (server), it directs them across multiple runways to keep everything moving smoothly. For industries such as healthcare, drug discovery, and financial services, SAS Grid has been the backbone of enterprise analytics, powering complex statistical models, clinical trial analyses, risk modeling, and fraud detection at massive scale.

Today, storage innovations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) are making it more cost-effective than ever to migrate these legacy SAS Grid environments to the cloud—without sacrificing the performance required by these demanding applications. Traditionally, SAS Grid runs on expensive on-premises hardware and moving it to the cloud raises real concerns about slowdowns and reliability. AWS directly bridges that gap, delivering the flexibility and economics of the cloud while preserving the speed and resilience on which these workloads depend.

This post is written for anyone involved in deciding, building, or paying for cloud infrastructure in SAS Grid-heavy organizations. This includes admins and architects doing technical planning, IT leaders in regulated industries evaluating options, data scientists concerned about performance impacts, and finance teams focused on cost optimization.

The on-premises challenge

Managing clustered computing and storage environments for SAS Grid requires substantial hardware investment and specialized expertise that many customers would rather not maintain. On-premises SAS Grid deployments demand expensive storage arrays, often combining hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD) to balance performance and cost. As datasets grow into the petabyte range, organizations face continuous capital expenditures to expand capacity and maintain performance.

Beyond the hardware costs, running SAS Grid on-premises requires dedicated teams to manage storage provisioning, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and infrastructure maintenance. These operational burdens divert resources from innovation and strategic initiatives.

Moving to the cloud seems like the obvious answer—and it is. However, until now storage options for high-performance workloads such as SAS Grid have been limited to more expensive all-SSD solutions. Although these deliver excellent performance, they come at a premium price point that can make cloud migration economically challenging, especially for organizations with multi-petabyte datasets that include both frequently and infrequently accessed data.

Introducing Amazon FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering: The ideal storage for SAS Grid cloud migrations

The new Amazon FSx for Lustre storage class, FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering, changes the economics of cloud migration for SAS Grid environments. This innovative storage solution is specifically designed for workloads such as SAS Grid that have a mix of hot and cold data and don’t require consistent all-SSD performance for every byte of every file.

FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering offers the lowest-cost high-performance file storage in the cloud, reducing storage costs for infrequently accessed data by up to 96% when compared to other managed Lustre options. With a starting price of less than $0.005 per GB-month, it delivers the price-performance characteristics that make SAS Grid cloud migrations financially compelling.

How Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering works

The value of FSx Intelligent-Tiering lies in its automatic data management. Your data moves seamlessly between three storage tiers based on access patterns, with no manual intervention required: 

1) Frequent Access tier: Data accessed within the last 30 days stays in this tier.

2) Infrequent Access tier: Data not accessed for 30–90 days automatically moves here, reducing costs by 44% when compared to the Frequent Access tier.

3) Archive tier: Data untouched for 90+ days migrates to this tier, delivering a 65% cost reduction when compared to the Infrequent Access tier.

Regardless of which tier your data resides in, it remains instantly accessible with retrieval times measured in tens of milliseconds—not hours or days. This means that your SAS Grid applications continue to run without modification, transparently accessing data across all tiers as needed. Current analysis datasets remain in high-performance storage, historical datasets move to lower-cost storage, reference data is automatically tiered based on usage, and seasonal or cyclical workloads benefit from dynamic tiering.

Fully elastic storage that scales with your needs

Unlike traditional storage systems that require upfront capacity provisioning, FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering is fully elastic. Your filesystem is virtually unlimited in space and you only pay for the data that you store. This eliminates the expensive over-provisioning that’s common with on-premises storage arrays, where organizations must purchase capacity for future growth to avoid running out of space.

For SAS Grid workloads, this elasticity is transformative. You can start with gigabytes of experimental data and seamlessly scale to petabyte-scale production datasets without any storage management overhead or capacity planning exercises.

Performance that matches workload requirements

FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering delivers impressive performance characteristics that align perfectly with SAS Grid’s demanding requirements:

Throughput: Provision up to 2 TiB/s throughput.

IOPS: Millions of IOPS for writes and cached reads.

Latency: Sub-millisecond latencies for data in the optional SSD read cache, and tens of milliseconds for other data.

The optional SSD read cache is particularly valuable for latency-sensitive portions of your SAS Grid workloads. It can automatically scale with your throughput or be independently or manually adjusted based on your performance needs. This gives you SSD-level performance where you need it, at HDD pricing.

Superior price-performance

The numbers speak for themselves. FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering delivers up to 34% better price-performance when compared to on-premises HDD file storage and up to 70% better price-performance when compared to other high-performance file systems in the cloud. For organizations migrating SAS Grid environments, this translates to significant cost savings while maintaining or even improving application performance.

Real-world benefits for SAS grid migrations

Organizations that have migrated SAS Grid to AWS using FSx for Lustre have seen remarkable performance results — and with the new Intelligent-Tiering storage class, the economics are even more compelling.

Smartronix and T-Mobile migrated SAS Grid to AWS using FSx for Lustre and observed SAS applications’ runtime drop over 50% with zero code changes. These performance gains come from the combination of modern Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute instances and the high bandwidth of FSx for Lustre. The Lustre file system is specifically designed for the large-block, sequential I/O patterns that characterize SAS workloads, delivering the throughput and IOPS that keep compute resources fully used.

Beyond performance, migrating SAS Grid to AWS with FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering delivers other strategic benefits including improved economics and security:

Reduced total cost of ownership: Eliminate capital expenditures for storage hardware, reduce operational overhead, and pay only for the resources you actually use.

Improved disaster recovery: Use AWS Backup for automated, cross-Region backups with low Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

Enhanced security and compliance: Benefit from the comprehensive security controls, encryption at rest and in transit, and compliance certifications of AWS that meet the requirements of highly regulated industries.

Data center consolidation: Remove a major impediment to closing on-premises data centers by migrating one of your most demanding infrastructure components to the cloud.

Integration with modern analytics: Enable your teams to combine SAS applications with cloud-native tools such as Python, R, and Amazon SageMaker, expanding the value of your data assets.

Getting started

Create a file system through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), API, or AWS CloudFormation. Select the Intelligent-Tiering storage class, specify your desired throughput capacity and metadata IOPS, and AWS handles the rest. The system automatically configures the SSD read cache based on your throughput selection, although you can customize it if needed. For more detailed instructions, go to the “Intelligent-Tiering” section in the FSx for Lustre PoC Deployment Guide.

Conclusion

For organizations running SAS Grid environments, the path to cloud migration just became significantly clearer and more cost-effective. Amazon FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering delivers the unique combination of high performance, elastic scalability, and low cost that makes it the ideal storage solution for these demanding workloads.

This new storage class eliminates the need for upfront capacity provisioning, automatically optimizes costs through intelligent data tiering, and delivers the performance SAS Grid requires, thereby removing the traditional barriers to cloud migration. Organizations can now modernize their infrastructure, reduce costs, and position themselves for future innovation—all while preserving the critical SAS applications that drive their business.

Ready to learn more? Visit FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering to explore how FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering can transform your SAS Grid cloud migration journey.