Choosing an Amazon FSx File System
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.
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 |
|
| ZFS or other Linux-based file servers | FSx for OpenZFS |
Microsoft Windows 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.
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FSx for |
FSx for |
FSx for Windows File Server |
FSx for Lustre |
Performance and Scale |
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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 |
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. |
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Accessibility and Integrations |
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Client compatibility |
Windows, Linux macOS |
Windows, Linux, macOS |
Windows, Linux, macOS |
Linux |
Protocol support |
SMB 2.0, 2.1, |
NFS 3, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 |
SMB 2.0, 2.1, |
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 |
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On-premises caching of FSx data |
✓: NetApp Global File Cache, NetApp FlexCache |
|
✓: Amazon FSx File Gateway |
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Backup and disaster recovery from on premises to AWS |
✓: NetApp SnapMirror |
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Support for compute burst to the cloud (use of FSx as an on-AWS cache of data that resides on premises) |
✓: NetApp FlexCache |
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Price/performance Optimization |
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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 |
User/group quotas |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
Data compression and/or compaction ** |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
Data deduplication ** |
✓ |
|
✓ |
|
** Applies to both file system storage and backups |
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Availability and Data Protection |
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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% |
Multi-AZ: 99.99% |
Multi-AZ: 99.99% |
Single-AZ: 99.5% |
Crash-consistent incremental backups |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
Inline instantaneous snapshots |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
End-user file restore |
✓ |
✓ |
✓ |
|
Instant cloning |
✓ |
✓ |
|
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Cross-region replication |
✓: NetApp SnapMirror |
|
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✓: Using S3 cross-region replication |
Cross-region/cross-account backups |
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✓ (Cross-region) |
✓ |
✓ |
Security and Compliance |
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Active Directory support for file system access authentication and access control |
✓ |
|
✓ |
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File access auditing |
✓ |
|
✓ |
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Access Control Lists (ACLs) |
✓: NFS 4.0, v4.1, NTFS |
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✓: NTFS |
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Anti-virus integration |
✓ |
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Compliance and certification |
HIPAA BAA, PCI/DSS, ISO, SOC, IRAP, GDPR, ISMAP, FINMA, MTCS, C5, ENS High, OSPAR, HITRUST CSF |
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Learn more about Amazon FSx