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>> Welcome back to AWS storage day.
This is the Cubes continuous coverage.
My name is Dave Vellante,
and we're going to talk about file storage.
80% of the world's data is in unstructured storage.
And most of that is in file format.
Devs want infrastructure as code.
They want to be able to provision and manage storage
through an API, and they want that cloud agility.
They want to be able to scale up, scale down,
pay by the drink.
And the big news of storage day was really the partnership,
deep partnership between AWS and NetApp.
And with me to talk about that as Ed Naim,
who's the general manager of Amazon FSX and Anthony Lye,
executive vice president and GM of public cloud at NetApp.
Two Cube alums.
Great to see you guys again. Thanks for coming on.
>> Thanks for having us.
>> So Ed, let me start with you.
You launched FSX 2018 at re-invent.
How has it being used today?
>> Well, we've talked about MSX on the Cube before Dave,
but let me start by recapping that FSX makes it easy to,
to launch and run fully managed feature rich
high performance file storage in the cloud.
And we built MSX from the ground up really
to have the reliability, the scalability
you were talking about.
The simplicity to support,
a really wide range of workloads and applications.
And with FSX customers choose the file system that powers
their file storage with full access to the file systems
feature sets, the performance profiles and the data
management capabilities.
And so since reinvent 2018, when we launched this service,
we've offered two file system choices for customers.
So the first was a Windows file server,
and that's really storage built on top of Windows server
designed as a really simple solution
for Windows applications that require shared storage.
And then Lustre, which is an open source file system
that's the world's most popular
high-performance file system.
And the Amazon FSX model has really resonated strongly
with customers for a few reasons.
So first, for customers who currently managed network
attached storage or NAS on premises,
it's such an easy path to move their applications
and their application data to the cloud.
FSX works and feels like the NAZA appliances
that they're used to, but added to all of that
are the benefits of a fully managed cloud service.
And second, for builders developing modern new apps,
it helps them deliver fast, consistent experiences
for Windows and Linux in a simple and an agile way.
And then third, for research scientists,
its storage performance and its capabilities
for dealing with data at scale
really make it a no-brainer storage solution.
And so as a result,
the service is being used for a pretty wide spectrum
of applications and workloads across industries.
So I'll give you a couple of examples.
So there's this class of what we call
common enterprise IT use cases.
So think of things like end user file shares
the corporate IT applications, content management systems,
highly available database deployments.
And then there's a variety of common line of business
and vertical workloads that are running on FSX as well.
So financial services,
there's a lot of modeling and analytics, workloads,
life sciences, a lot of genomics analysis,
media and entertainment rendering
and transcoding and visual effects, automotive.
We have a lot of electronic control units,
simulations, and object detection, semiconductor,
a lot of EDA, electronic design automation.
And then oil and gas, seismic data processing,
pretty common workload in FSX. And then there's a class of,
of really ultra high performance workloads
that are running on FSX as well.
Think of things like big data analytics.
So SAS grid is a, is a common application.
A lot of machine learning model training,
and then a lot of what people would consider traditional
or classic high performance computing or HPC.
>> Great. Thank you for that.
Just quick follow-up if I may,
and I want to bring Anthony into the conversation.
So why NetApp? This is not a Barney deal,
this was not elbow grease going into a Barney deal.
You know, I love you. You love me. We do a press release.
But, but why NetApp? Why ONTAP? Why now?
(momentary silence)
Ed, that was to you.
>> Was that a question for Anthony?
>> No, for you Ed. And then I want to bring Anthony in.
>> Oh, Sure. Sorry.
Okay. Sure.
Yeah, I mean it, uh,
Dave, it really stemmed from both companies realizing
a combined offering would be highly valuable
to and impactful for customers.
In reality, we started collaborating in Amazon
and NetApp on the service probably about two years ago.
And we really had a joint vision
that we wanted to provide AWS customers
with the full power of ONTAP.
The complete ONTAP with every capability
and with ONTAP's full performance,
but fully managed an offer as a full-blown
AWS native service.
So what that would mean is that customers
get all of ONTAP's benefits
along with the simplicity and the agility, the scalability,
the security, and the reliability of an AWS service.
>> Great. Thank you.
So Anthony, I have watched NetApp reinvent itself
started in workstations, saw you go into the enterprise,
I saw you lean into virtualization,
you told me at least two years,
it might've been three years ago, Dave,
we are going all in on the cloud.
We're going to lead this next, next chapter.
And so, I want you to bring in your perspective.
You're re-inventing NetApp yet again, you know,
what are your thoughts?
>> Well, you know,
NetApp and AWS have had a very long relationship.
I think it probably dates now about nine years.
And what we really wanted to do in NetApp
was give the most important constituent of all
an experience that helped them progress their business.
So ONTAP, you know,
the industry's leading shared storage platform,
we wanted to make sure that in AWS,
it was as good as it was on premise.
We love the idea of giving customers
this wonderful concept of symmetry. You know,
ONTAP runs the biggest applications
in the largest enterprises on the planet.
And we wanted to give not just those customers
an opportunity to embrace the Amazon cloud,
but we wanted to also extend the capabilities of ONTAP
through FSX to a new customer audience.
Maybe those smaller companies that didn't really purchase
on premise infrastructure,
people that were born in the cloud.
And of course, this gives us a great opportunity
to present a fully managed ONTAP within the FSX platform,
to a lot of non NetApp customers, to our competitors
customers, Dave, that frankly,
haven't done the same as we've done.
And I think we are the benefactors of it,
and we're in turn passing that innovation, that,
that transformation onto the,
to the customers and the partners.
>> You know, one is the,
the key aspect here is that it's a managed service.
I don't think that could be, you know, overstated.
And the other is that the cloud nativeness of this Anthony,
you mentioned here, our marketplace is great,
but this is some serious engineering going on here.
So Ed maybe, maybe start with the perspective
of a managed service. I mean, what does that mean?
The whole ball of wax?
>> Yeah. I mean,
what it means to a customer is they go into the AWS console
or they go to the AWS SDK or the,
the AWS CLI and they are easily able to provision a resource
provision, a file system,
and it automatically will get built for them.
And if there's nothing that they need to do at that point,
they get an endpoint that they have access to the file
system from and that's it.
We handle patching, we handle all of the provisioning,
we handle any hardware replacements
that might need to happen along the way.
Everything is fully managed.
So the customer really can focus
not on managing their file system,
but on doing all of the other things that they,
that they want to do and that they need to do.
>> So. So Anthony, in a way you're disrupting yourself,
which is kind of what you told me a couple of years ago.
You're not afraid to do that because if we don't do it,
somebody else is going to do it because you're,
you're used to the old days,
you're selling a box and you say, we'll see you next time,
you know, three or four years.
So from, from your customer's standpoint,
what's their reaction to this notion of a managed service
and what does it mean to NetApp?
>> Well, so I think the most important thing it does
is it gives them investment protection.
The wonderful thing about what we've built with Amazon
in the FSX profile is it's a complete ONTAP.
And so one ONTAP cluster on premise can immediately see
and connect to an ONTAP environment under FSX.
We can then establish various different connectivities.
We can use snap mirror technologies for disaster recovery.
We can use efficient data transfer for things like dev test
and backup.
Of course, the wonderful thing that we've done,
that we've gone beyond, above and beyond,
what anybody else has done is we want to make sure
that the actual primary application itself,
one that was sort of built using NAS
built in an on-premise environment
an SAP and Oracle, et cetera,
as Ed said, that we can move those over and have the
confidence to run the application with no changes
on an Amazon environment. So, so what we've really done,
I think for customers, the NetApp customers,
the non NetApp customers, is we've given them an enterprise
grade shared storage platform that's as good
in an Amazon cloud as it was in an on-premise data center.
And that's something that's very unique to us.
>> Can we talk a little bit more about those,
those use cases? You know, both, both of you.
What are you seeing as some of the more interesting ones
that you can share?
Ed, maybe you can start.
>> Yeah, happy to. The customer discussions that we've,
we've been in have really highlighted four cases,
four use cases the customers are telling us
they'll use a service for. So maybe I'll cover two
and maybe Anthony can cover the other two.
So, the first is application migrations.
And customers are increasingly looking
to move their applications to AWS.
And a lot of those are applications
work with file storage today.
And so we're talking about applications like SAP.
We're talking about relational databases
like SQL server and Oracle.
We're talking about vertical applications
like Epic and the healthcare space.
As another example, lots of media entertainment, rendering,
and transcoding, and visual effects workload.
workflows require Windows, Linux, and Mac iOS
access to the same set of data.
And what application administrators really want
is they want the easy button.
They want fully featured file storage
that has the same capabilities,
the same performance that their applications are used to.
Has extremely high availability and durability,
and it can easily enable them to meet compliance
and security needs with a robust set of data protection
and security capabilities.
And I'll give you an example, Accenture, for example,
has told us that a key obstacle their clients face
when migrating to the cloud is potentially re-architecting
their applications to adopt new technologies.
And they expect that Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP
will significantly accelerate their customers migrations
to the cloud.
Then a second one is storage migrations.
So storage admins are increasingly looking
to extend their on-premise storage to the cloud.
And why they want to do that is they want to be more agile
and they want to be responsive
to growing data sets and growing workload needs.
They want to last to capacity.
They want the ability to spin up and spin down.
They want easy disaster recovery
across geographically isolated regions.
They want the ability to change performance levels
at any time.
So all of this goodness that they get from the cloud
is what they want.
And more and more of them also are looking to make
their company's data accessible to cloud services
for analytics and processing.
So services like ECS and EKS and workspaces and App Stream
and VMware cloud and SageMaker and orchestration services
like parallel cluster and AWS batch.
But at the same time, they want all these cloud benefits,
but at the same time, they have established
data management workflows, and they build processes
and they've built automation, leveraging APIs
and capabilities of on-prem NAS appliances.
It's really tough for them to just start from scratch
with that stuff.
So this offering provides them the best of both worlds.
They get the benefits of the cloud
with the NAS data management capabilities
that they're used to.
>> Right.
>> Ed: So Anthony, maybe,
do you want to talk about the other two?
>> Well, so, you know, first and foremost,
you heard from Ed earlier on the, the,
the FSX sort of construct and how successful it's been.
And one of the real reasons it's been so successful is,
it takes advantage of all of the latest
storage technologies, compute technologies,
networking technologies.
What's great is all of that's hidden from the user.
What FSX does is it delivers a service.
And what that means for an ONTAP customer
is you're going to have ONTAP with an SLA and an SLM.
You're going to have hundreds of thousands
of IOPS available to you and sub-millisecond latencies.
What's also really important is the design for FSX and app
ONTAP was really to provide consistency on the NetApp API
and to provide full access to ONTAP from the Amazon console,
the Amazon SDK, or the Amazon CLI. So in this case,
you've got this wonderful benefit of all of the,
sort of the 29 years of innovation of NetApp
combined with all the innovation AWS,
all presented consistently to a customer.
What Ed said, which I'm particularly excited about,
is customers will see this
just as they see any other AWS service.
So if they want to use ONTAP in combination with some
incremental compute resources,
maybe with their own encryption keys,
maybe with directory services,
they may want to use it with other services like SageMaker.
All of those things are immediately exposed to Amazon FSX
for the app ONTAP.
We do some really intelligent things
just in the storage layer.
So, for example, we do intelligent tiering.
So the customer is constantly getting the,
sort of the best TCO.
So what that means is we're using Amazon's S3 storage
as a tiered service,
so that we can back off code data
off of the primary file system
to give the customer the optimal capacity,
the optimal throughput,
while maintaining the integrity of the file system.
It's the same with backup.
It's the same with disaster recovery,
whether we're operating in a hybrid AWS cloud,
or we're operating in an AWS region or across regions.
>> Well, thank you. I think this,
this announcement is a big deal for a number of reasons.
First of all, it's the largest market.
Like you said, you're the gold standard.
I'll give you that, Anthony, because you guys earned it.
And so it's a large market,
but you always had to make previously,
you have to make trade-offs.
Either I could do file in the cloud,
but I didn't get the rich functionality that,
you know, NetApp's mature stack brings, or, you know,
you could have wrapped your stack in Kubernete's container
and thrown it into the cloud and hosted it there.
But now that it's a managed service and presumably
you're underneath, you're taking advantage. As I say,
my inference is there's some serious engineering
going on here. You're taking advantage of
some of the cloud native capabilities.
Yeah, maybe it's the different, you know, ECE two types,
but also being able to bring in, we're,
we're entering a new data era with machine intelligence
and other capabilities that we really didn't have access to
last decade. So I want to, I want to close with, you know,
give you guys the last word.
Maybe each of you could give me your thoughts
on how you see this partnership of, for the, in the future.
Particularly from a customer standpoint.
Ed, maybe you could start.
And then Anthony, you can bring us home.
>> Yeah, well, Anthony and I and our teams
have gotten to know each other really well in,
in ideating around what this experience will be
and then building the product.
And, and we have this,
this common vision that it is something that's going to
really move the needle for customers. Providing the full
ONTAP experience with the power of a,
of a native AWS service.
So we're really excited.
We're, we're in this for the long haul together.
We have, we've partnered on everything from engineering,
to product management, to support. Like the, the full thing.
This is a co-owned effort,
a joint effort backed by both companies.
And we have, I think a pretty remarkable product on day one,
one that I think is going to delight customers.
And we have a really rich roadmap
that we're going to be building together
over, over the years.
So I'm excited about getting this in customer's hands.
>> Great, thank you. Anthony, bring us home.
>> Well, you know,
it's one of those sorts of rare chances where
you get to do something with Amazon
that no one's ever done. You know,
we're sort of sitting on the inside,
we are a peer of theirs,
and we're able to develop at very high speeds
in combination with them to release continuously
to the customer base.
So what you're going to see here is rapid innovation.
You're going to see a whole host of new services.
Services that NetApp develops,
services that Amazon develops.
And then the whole ecosystem
is going to have access to this,
whether they're historically built on the NetApp APIs
or increasingly built on the AWS APIs.
I think you're going to see orchestrations.
I think you're going to see the capabilities expand
the overall opportunity for AWS
to bring enterprise applications over.
For me personally, Dave, you know,
I've demonstrated yet again to the NetApp customer base,
how much we care about them and their future.
Selfishly, you know,
I'm looking forward to telling the story to my competitors,
customer base, because they haven't done it.
So, you know, I think we've been bold.
I think we've been committed as you said,
three and a half years ago,
I promised you that we were going to do
everything we possibly could.
You know, people always say, you know, what's,
what's the real benefit of this. And at the end of the day,
customers and partners will be the real winners.
This, this innovation, this sort of,
as a service I think is going to expand our market,
allow our customers to do more with Amazon
than they could before.
It's one of those rare cases, Dave,
where I think one plus one equals about seven, really.
>> I love the vision and excited to see the execution
Ed and Anthony, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube.
Congratulations on getting to this point and good luck.
>> Anthony and Ed: Thank you.
>> All right. And thank you for watching everybody.
This is Dave Vellante for the Cube's continuous coverage
of AWS storage day. Keep it right there.
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