AWS has introduced a cheaper – and slower – disk storage option for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, which previously used flash memory only.
Single-Availability Zone HDD storage is priced at $0.013 per GB-month and Multi-AZ HDD storage is priced at $0.025 per GB-month. AWS claims this makes Amazon FSx for Windows File Server the lowest cost file storage for Windows applications and workloads in the public cloud.
The effective cost is reduced to $0.0065 per GB-month for a single-AZ file system and $0.0125 per GB-month for a multi-AZ file system if customers use the service in conjunction with data deduplication and achieve 50 per cent space savings, according to Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist.
AWS DataSync or robocopy can move files from faster FSx SSDs to FSx HDDs.
Amazon FSx’s HDD option provides up to 12MB/sec of throughput per TiB of capacity, with bursts up to 80MB/sec per TiB. FSx for Windows File Server is provisioned on file system throughput as well as capacity, from 8MB/sec up to 2,048MB/sec. There can be up to 3,135MB/sec of network throughput capacity. AWS uses SMB Multichannel – multiple network connections – to achieve this.
The amount of provisioned bandwidth controls the size of a fast in-memory cache for the file share. This enables HDD-based FSx to deliver hundreds of thousands of network IOPS and its high throughput capability, AWS said.
The performance capabilities for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server are somewhat complex. You can find out more by delving into Amazon documentation here.
