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>> We're back at Storage Day, at Amazon in Boston.
I'm Dave Vellante, with theCUBE.
Ed Naim is here, he's the general manager of FSX.
Ed, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you.
>> Thanks for having me Dave.
>> Okay so explain to me why you guys launched FSX
for Windows file server, why now?
>> Well we did it because customers asked us to do it.
What customers told us was that they were tired
of all of the effort and overhead in managing
Windows file systems and Windows file servers on their own.
Everything from routine maintenance like patching,
to provisioning, they just didn't want to have to do
all of that heavy lifting.
They asked us for a simple solution,
fully-managed solution on the Cloud.
There's a lot of Windows data out there.
A lot of data that's accessed from Windows computers.
AWS is the Cloud that has the most Windows workloads
running on it.
So it was a very natural ask for customers to ask us
as they're moving their Windows workloads onto AWS,
to have a file system that's fully managed for them
that can be accessed by those workloads.
So it was actually very natural,
and unexpected ask from customers.
>> A lot of people may not know that,
but it does kind of make sense.
There's so much Windows out there,
you're the Cloud leader, so peanut butter and jelly.
How do you see customers using FSX for Windows?
>> What's really exciting is they're using it
for a really broad spectrum of workloads.
So everything from traditional user shares
and home directories, to development environments
to analytics workloads to video transcoding.
It's a very wide spectrum of workloads
that are on the service and we're continuing to see
new types of workloads everyday which is really exciting.
>> So we're here at Storage Day,
what exactly is new around FSX for Windows
file service specifically?
>> We've launched a number of capabilities this year,
throughout the year.
One of the significant ones that we launched
was the ability for customers to use their self managed
active directories and join their FSX file systems to those.
So we now have two options,
customers can use a fully-managed AWS
fully-managed active directory, or their own with FSX.
We launched a number of capabilities
around access from on-premises.
For example customers can now access or,
when we launched it,
we announced that they could now access their file systems
over direct connect connections or VPN,
so they can access Windows file systems from computers
and from n-users that are running on-premises.
Quite a few announcements this year,
those are just two examples.
We're really excited about really a slew of announcements
and features that we're launching now.
I can get into those if you'd like.
>> Yeah give me some examples if you would.
>> So one of the most questions we've had from customers
is can we offer a native multi-AZ capability,
multi-availabilities on capability.
So a lot of customers are running enterprise-grade
workloads on FSX, and they want to move more and more
of those workloads onto AWS.
They don't want to have to manage the overhead
of using something like a distributed file system
or DFS replication between FSX file systems
and different AZs.
So we're launching a fully-managed super simple
multi-AZ capability.
That's a deployment option that customers will have.
In addition to what we already had,
which was the single-AZ deployment option.
>> You may see some recurring themes when you talk to
folks at Amazon and they announce services,
it's the same sort of mantra of be able to reduce
that heavy lifting, shift your focus to things
that will add more value to your business.
Take advantage of these other services
through these integrations that we're doing.
It kind of feels like a no-brainer,
but I give you the last word.
Is it, why is it?
Why should customers?
Sell me on why I should move my data to the Cloud?
>> We like to think of it as a no-brainer,
because we are fully managing everything for the customer.
The service is built on top of Windows server.
It provides a fully compatible Windows file system
and we manage that fully for customers,
so you get complete compatibility with SMB,
complete compatibility with NTFS
file system semantics and features.
It's a very simple move for customers to move
their existing workloads onto the service,
and have it be fully managed.
A couple of the other features that we're launching
that I do want to mention are,
we're launching data deduplication,
we're launching a whole bunch of administrative capabilities
like user quotas, we're extending our administrative CLI
to do things like allow customers to create
shares programmatically, so really a very exciting
set of capabilities that we really think make this
a no-brainer for customers.
>> Well that's another recurring thing is you guys,
you drop prices.
Moore's Law says prices continue to drop,
but the difference is Amazon, you make it transparent.
If I use a service that's lower cost, my bill goes down.
And then of course I end up using more,
because this is an elastic world, so that's a good thing.
But Ed, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
>> The other thing, is you guys are like Windows specialists,
which is kind of ironic.
You're a leader in Windows.
>> Well it really comes from what our customers
are asking us for.
They see moving their Windows workloads as a first step
to full modernization, and being all in on the Cloud.
>> Great, well again, thanks Ed.
>> Thank you.
>> And thank you for watching, everybody.
We'll be right back right after this short break.
Dave Vellante with theCUBE.
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