AWS held its annual re:Invent conference as a hybrid event last week featuring live keynotes and sessions in Las Vegas while streaming everything for a wider audience tuning in remotely. Re:Invent 2021 was the first since Adam Selipsky became AWS CEO last May, but there was no talk of a new direction for the No. 1 public cloud provider. Rather than splashy new services, AWS mostly expanded current offerings.
The news was wide ranging – including a new 5G managed service mainframe modernization and services around ML It included hardware additions such as new Outpost and Snowball Edge tape migration devices, along a new Arm-based Graviton3 processor that AWS promises will be 25% faster and use 60% less power than its current chips. But the conference lacked a blockbuster new release. This was especially true for storage and data management services, as AWS concentrated on beefing up current services.
Amazon FSx for OpenZFS
Until last September, Amazon had two FSx services – one for Windows file servers and one for Lustre aimed at high performance computing. Now it has four. AWS added FSx for NetApp ONTAP three months ago, allowing enterprise users to consume NetApp’s file system as a managed service.
At reinvent 2021, AWS added OpenZFS to the FSx menu for those who want ZFS or other Linux-based file servers.
AWS for FSx is a completely managed service for moving on-premises data to AWS. AWS publishes a chart to help customers compare the file systems and help decide which is best for them.
OpenZFS has the lowest per GB charges of the four FSx options, although it lacks cost optimization features of some of the others and the enterprise data protection features of ONTAP. Powered by Amazon’s new Graviton processors, AWS promises 1 million IOPS with latencies of hundreds of microseconds for OpenZFS.
FSx for OpenZFS costs $0.045 per GB per month for SSD storage capacity and $0.025 per GB/month for backup data for a single file system. Those prices are with compression enabled. Without compression, it’s $0.090 per GB/month for SSD capacity and $0.050 per GB/month for backup. Also, you pay $0.260 per MBps/month for throughput capacity and $0.0060 per IOPS/month if you want more than the default  3 IOPS for every GB of SSD storage. There are also fees for transferring data across regions, which vary according to region. For most US regions, it costs $0.02 per GB to transfer data.
FSx for Lustre also gets a speed bump by moving to Graviton, and AWS added full bi-directional synchronization of file systems with S3 and the ability to synch file systems with multiple S3 buckets or prefixes.
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