Why do you need FSx for Windows File Server?

  • Fully managed native windows file servers/shares. Purpose is to integrate with Directory Service or Self-Managed AD.
  • Single or Multi-AZ within a VPC. Therefore, it’s Highly Available.
  • Accessible using VPC, Peering, VPN, Direct Connect.
  • A good example is that Workspaces clients can access to shared file system created by FSx.
  • It also supports volume shadow copies which is file level versioning feature by Microsoft.
  • Highly performant from 5MB/s to 2GB/s, 100k’s IOPS and <1ms latency.
  • VSS: User-Driven file/folder level restores provided by FSx share without having to engage admin.
  • Native file systems accessible over SMB protocol.
  • It also supports DFS which is Distributed File System by Microsoft for scaling out the file servers.

FSx for Lustre

  • Designed for various high performing workloads such as ML, Big Data, Financial Modelling.
  • Managed Lustre - designed for HPC - Linux clients (POSIX style permissions).
  • 100’GB/s throughput and sub milisecond latency.
  • Deployment Types;
    • Persistent: Longer term, HA (in one AZ), self-healing
    • Scratch: Highly optimised for short term no replication & fast. This is when you want pure performance.
  • Available over a VPN or Direct Connect.
  • You can use S3 as a repository and then the data can be “lazy loaded” from S3 into the file system as it’s needed. Data can be exported back to S3 at any point using hsm_archive.
  • Lustre splits data and store into different discs;
    • Metada Targets
    • Data itself split across Object Storage Targets each 1.17TiB
    • Size of the filesystem is min 1.2TiB then increments of 2.4TiB

Scaling out storage & performance with DFSN for Windows workloads

  • FSx supports up to 64TB file system size. You can scale out this by using Distributed File System Namespace (DFSN) by Microsoft. You can use to group file shares into one common file structure. Up to 10Gbps with millions of IOPS