Choosing an Amazon FSx File System

Overview

Amazon FSx lets you choose between four widely-used file systems: Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, OpenZFS, and Windows File Server. This choice is typically based on your familiarity with a given file system or on matching the file system's feature sets, performance profiles, and data management capabilities to the requirements of your workload.

Photo of a laptop

Selecting a familiar file system

When moving existing applications and workloads to AWS, a common consideration is to choose the file system that most closely matches your current storage technology so that you can maintain application compatibility and not change how you manage your data.

Current storage technology

Recommended Amazon FSx file system

Lustre or other parallel file systems FSx for Lustre

NetApp ONTAP or other NAS appliances

FSx for NetApp ONTAP

ZFS or other Linux-based file servers  FSx for OpenZFS

Microsoft Windows Server

FSx for Windows File Server

Selecting a file system based on workload requirements

Amazon FSx file systems offer feature sets, performance profiles, and data management capabilities that support a wide variety of use cases.  You can choose a file system that enables you to cost-effectively power your workload with the necessary reliability, functionality, performance, and security.

 

FSx for
NetApp ONTAP

FSx for
OpenZFS

FSx for Windows File Server

FSx for Lustre

Performance and Scale

Latency

<1 ms

<0.5 ms

<1 ms

<1 ms

Max. throughput per file system

72-80 GB/s*

10-21 GB/s*

12-20 GB/s*

1000 GB/s

Max. throughput available to a single client accessing a file system

18 GB/s

10 GB/s

20 GB/s

21 GB/s

Max. IOPS per file system

Millions

1-2 million

Hundreds of thousands

Millions

Maximum file system size

Virtually unlimited
(10s of PBs)

512 TiB

64 TiB

Multiple PBs

* The lower number in the range refers to baseline throughput. The upper number in the range refers to higher levels of throughput enabled by automatic caching of frequently accessed data, network and disk performance bursting, and efficiencies from data compression.

Accessibility and Integrations

Client compatibility

Windows, Linux macOS

Windows, Linux, macOS

Windows, Linux, macOS

Linux

Protocol support

SMB 2.0, 2.1,
3.0, 3.1.1
NFS 3, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2
iSCSI (shared block storage)

NFS 3, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2

SMB 2.0, 2.1,
3.0, 3.1.1

Custom (POSIX-compliant) protocol optimized for performance

AWS Compute

EC2, ECS, EKS

EC2, ECS, EKS

EC2, ECS, EKS

EC2, ECS, EKS

Automatic import/export of S3 data sets

 

 

 

 

Hybrid usage

On-premises caching of FSx data

: NetApp Global File Cache, NetApp FlexCache

 

: Amazon FSx File Gateway

 

Backup and disaster recovery from on premises to AWS

: NetApp SnapMirror

 

 

 

Support for compute burst to the cloud (use of FSx as an on-AWS cache of data that resides on premises)

: NetApp FlexCache

 

 

 

Price/performance Optimization

Cost-optimized storage for cold, infrequently-accessed data

: Low-cost tier with cold data automatically cycled to it

 

: HDD storage option

: HDD storage option

Choice of throughput and IOPS levels

: Throughput and IOPS

: Throughput and IOPS

: Throughput and IOPS

: Throughput and metadata IOPS

User/group quotas

Data compression and/or compaction **

Data deduplication **

 

 

** Applies to both file system storage and backups

Availability and Data Protection

Deployment options

Single-AZ and Multi-AZ

Single-AZ and Multi-AZ

Single-AZ and Multi-AZ

Single-AZ - Persistent or Scratch

Availability SLA

Multi-AZ: 99.99%
Single-AZ: 99.9%

Multi-AZ: 99.99%
Single-AZ: 99.5%

Multi-AZ: 99.99%
Single-AZ: 99.5%

Single-AZ: 99.5%

Crash-consistent incremental backups

Inline instantaneous snapshots

 

End-user file restore

 

Instant cloning

 

 

Cross-region replication

✓: NetApp SnapMirror

 

 

✓: Using S3 cross-region replication

Cross-region/cross-account backups

 

           

  ✓

(Cross-region)

 ✓

Security and Compliance

Active Directory support for file system access authentication and access control

 

 

File access auditing

 

 

Access Control Lists (ACLs)

: NFS 4.0, v4.1, NTFS

 

: NTFS

 

Anti-virus integration

 

 

 

Compliance and certification

HIPAA BAA, PCI/DSS, ISO, SOC, IRAP, GDPR, ISMAP, FINMA, MTCS, C5, ENS High, OSPAR, HITRUST CSF