Moving to Managed File Systems September 2020 Notices Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the information in this document. This document: (a) is for informational purposes only, (b) represents current AWS product offerings and practices, which are subject to change without notice, and (c) does not create any commitments or assurances from AWS and its affiliates, suppliers or licensors. AWS products or services are provided “as is” without warranties, representations, or conditions of any kind, whether express or implied. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS and its customers. © 2020 Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 Amazon EFS .................................................................................................................... 2 Amazon FSx for Windows File Server ............................................................................. 3 Use Cases ........................................................................................................................... 3 Use Case 1: Moving to fully managed SMB file shares with AWS ................................. 3 Use Case 2: Moving to EFS Hosted Home Directories for Users and Applications ...... 5 Moving your data to the Cloud using Online Data Transfer ............................................ 6 Moving your data to the Cloud using Offline Data Transfer to AWS .............................. 7 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 8 Contributors ......................................................................................................................... 9 Further Reading ................................................................................................................... 9 Document Revisions............................................................................................................ 9 Abstract As enterprises and medium sized businesses take advantage of globalization, they need to store and distribute data and information globally. For example, employees in India may need to access data stored in London or New York, and the other way around. The need to access data globally in a timely manner increases the total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage. Organizations need to consider replication solutions, additional networking WAN/LAN costs, and additional data center and infrastructure costs. This whitepaper discusses two AWS services that can help organizations meet these challenges by moving to a managed file system. Amazon Web Services Moving to Managed File Systems Introduction According to IDG's research, 80% of data stored by organizations around the world is unstructured, as reported by TechRepublic1. Unstructured data includes office documents, department shared files, content management systems, web sites, test and development workflows, database backups, social media feeds, digital pictures and videos, audio transmissions, sensor data, and more. Unstructured data is most commonly stored as files on a file system. To meet the high demand for file storage, organizations have made significant financial investments into traditional on-premises file storage systems and network attached storage (NAS) systems from on-premises storage vendors. This has led to a proliferation of file shares in corporate data centers over the last two decades. However, the cost of owning and operating on-premises file storage systems goes beyond the initial capital investment. There are operational costs, such as data center real estate, power, cooling, hardware and software maintenance, regular patching and updating, and repair or replacement of faulty hardware, as well as the specialized staff required to manage and maintain this infrastructure. All this takes time, effort, and money. Also, for all storage systems, since they are hardware infrastructure, there will come a time when the system can no longer provide enough storage, is not performant enough, or becomes unsupported by the vendor. When this happens, a hardware refresh is required. While hardware refreshes typically involve the procurement and deployment of new infrastructure, what is often overlooked during storage systems refresh is that customers are repurchasing the capacity and performance of the retiring storage system all over again. They are not simply investing in the capacity, capability, and performance delta between the systems. Apart from procuring and deploying the new infrastructure, a hardware refresh also involves migrating the data. Whenever data is migrated from one system to another, there is a risk of data loss or data corruption, as well as the risks associated with cutting over to a new storage system due to the potential downtime and application reconfiguration involved. Additionally, the man-hours required for these types of migrations can take weeks, if not months. All of which are hidden, but nonetheless real costs. 1 Amazon Web Services Moving to Managed File Systems What organizations are ultimately looking for are storage solutions that meet the following criteria: • Enable them to procure capacity on-demand, avoid large upfront capital investments to test business ideas, and avoid stranded capacity costs. • Provide global access to data in a secure and compliant manner. • Reduce overhead costs associated with managing and supporting storage overall. • Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with ever-expanding storage needs. • Transform their organizations faster, innovate quicker, while delivering the highest level of availability, durability, and recoverability. With Amazon Web Services (AWS), customers don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure and only need to focus on the functionality of the service they want to use, at any capacity or performance scale. Amazon Web Services managed file services give customers the ability to move these workloads to the cloud. We will discuss the two most common services in the following section. Amazon EFS Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, fully managed, elastic cloud-native NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It supports NFS v4 and is frequently used by customers in simplifying their migrating NAS applications from on-premises to the AWS Cloud. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity. By using Amazon EFS, customers get managed file storage infrastructure, which removes the complexity of deploying, patching, and maintaining the underlying complex infrastructure. Customers can also use Amazon EFS to migrate locally running enterprise applications to the AWS Cloud. 2 Amazon Web Services Moving to Managed File Systems Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. It is built on Windows Server, delivering a wide range of administrative features such as user quotas, end-user file restores, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration. It offers single-AZ and multi-AZ deployment options, fully managed backups, and encryption of data at rest and in transit. Amazon FSx file storage is accessible from Windows, Linux, and macOS compute instances and devices running on AWS or on premises. You can optimize cost and performance with SSD and HDD storage options. Amazon FSx helps you reduce TCO with data deduplication. Use Cases In this white paper, we explore use cases where fully managed cloud file systems excel: • Migrating and running managed Windows File Shares (SMB) • Running network file system (NFS) file shares on AWS Use Case 1: Moving to fully managed SMB file shares with AWS Figure 1 shows a very typical enterprise with on-premises NAS file storage with access to/from multiple geographical locations. 3 Amazon Web Services Moving to Managed File Systems Figure 1 - How users access data on NAS or traditional file servers File storage is widely used by organizations within their on-premises infrastructure. Windows file storage is used for general purpose file/print servers, home directories, media repositories and a wide range of other uses since it is easy for end-users to share files, regardless of where they are located. File sharing is often integrated with users’ native environments. AWS provides a fully managed file system service that reduces operational burdens for IT teams, helps customers to lower costs, and improve agility, which leads to better and faster business insights. Using FSx for Windows File Server, customers can improve file storage availability with the use of multiple Availability Zones (AZs), which eliminates the need to deal with the complexity or cost of setting up multi-site clustering and replication. With the data in AWS, customers can innovate faster by taking advantage of integrations with other AWS services. Amazon FSx integrates with AWS hosted directory services, such as AWS Managed Microsoft AD. Using AWS Best