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Amazon Launches Fully Managed Elastic File System--NAS Vendors Tremble

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More big news today from Amazon Web Services (AWS) as they launch a fully managed file system for EC2 instances. The Amazone Elastic File System (EFS) is the company's first foray into the network attached storage (NAS) space and looks set to make existing NAS vendors nervous. The solution provides standard file system semantics that works with standard operating system APIs from a provisioning perspective.

EFS is NAS service that scales across thousands of instances and scales to petabyte scale. This scaling is helped by the fact that the storage capacity management is handled automatically by the platform itself. Tim Harder, Global Lead, AWS Block Storage Services said in a briefing that he believes this is a product that will greatly extend the number of workloads that customers will being across to AWS.

Application owners, IT teams and corporate users can all make use of this. For business owners, the ongoing cost of investing on capital-intensive NAS storage becomes problematic, especially as they're starting to have a preference to use all-flash storage. It is important to note that for both Block and File storage AWS is offering all-flash storage as the default.

For IT administrators, it has been problematic to get any sort of fidelity in terms of capacity planning for their NAS storage - by offering a NAS on a scalable basis and as a service, that capital requirement is completely removed. This builds out the breadth of AWS' storage offerings and completes the range of file solutions that customers have.

EFS is fully managed - there is no network, hardware or file layer that the end user needs to be responsible for. In order to use the service, AWS offers an EFS mount point. The file system grows or shrinks as content is added to or removed from the file system. Customers therefore have no need to provision storage capacity or performance, and they simply pay for what they use with no minimum fee. With EFS, multiple applications can make use of the same file system, meaning that EFS becomes the common file hub across data needs. To ensure security for this multi-application offering, EFS is built within VPC, AWS' virtual private cloud that ring fences data for security purposes.

AWS sees this being useful for content repositories, development environments, home directories, web server farms and big data workloads. In particular AWS has seen some good uptake for analytics use cases.

EFS leverages the NFSv4 a protocol that presents remote storage as a locally managed device. EFS leverages multiple availability zones so should provide good durability.

Using EFS looks very easy. Customers simply "mount" a file system on an EC2 instance - the file system appears as a local device. The NFSv4 client is standard on all Linux distributions. EFS can be set up and managed via the AWS management console, the AWS command line interface or a software development kit.

EFS is also integrated with AWS' identity service and allows for granular control over both action-level and resource-level permissions. Unfortunately EFS is not supporting encryption or snapshotting at launch - a big failing that AWS needs to remedy very soon.

In terms of pricing and availability, EFS is available in US West, US East and Ireland. One assumes that will expand to other geographies over time. In terms of pricing, there is no minimum-commitment or set-up fees and the amount charged is based on the average storage space used, throughout the month, measured hourly. Total cost is $0.30 per GB per month.

This looks like a big deal for AWS. It will help them continue their story around migrating legacy data to the cloud - all of those enterprises running NAS systems with spinning disks and looking lustily at all-flash arrays will now have an AWS-style option to go for. Clearly AWS needs to broaden the geographic footprint and functionality (encryption in particular), but I suspect that will come very soon.

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