AWS tries to lure users to its cloud via storage ease of use

Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering

This is an AWS attempt to try and whittle down cloud costs at the enterprise level.

“The new storage class is priced 85% lower than the existing SSD storage class and 20% lower than traditional HDD-based deployments on premises, and brings full elasticity and intelligent tiering to NAS data sets,” explained AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr. “Your data moves between three storage tiers (Frequent Access, Infrequent Access, and Archive) with no effort on your part, so you get automatic cost savings with no upfront costs or commitments.”

The three levels are based on data use; the Frequent Access tier contains data that has been accessed within the last 30 days; data that has been not been accessed for 30 to 90 days is stored in the Infrequent Access tier, at a 44% cost reduction from Frequent Access; and the Archive tier contains data that has not been accessed for 90 or more days, at a 65% cost reduction from Infrequent Access.

Kimball applauded AWS for the intelligent tiering in FSx, and for its support for OpenZFS. “Cost savings meets simplicity for enterprise users,” he said. “The whole notion of migrating data and having to manage tiering is time consuming and resource intensive. Which means cost, cost, cost. In this data era, enterprise IT organizations really don’t know what data is critical for feeding models or deep analytics. So the ability to find a more affordable model that can intelligently provision and place data makes life much simpler.”

“Expanding intelligent tiering in FSx is a big plus, especially for businesses looking for ways to reduce EC2-based file servers where they have few optimization tools,” added Brent Ellis, a senior analyst with Forrester. “Updates to storage optimized EC2 instances is a plus for companies with growing low latency data needs.”

Storage Browser for Amazon S3

This browser is described as an open source UI component to add to web apps, and it is supposed to facilitate data interactions on S3. AWS said that the frontend component would allow users to “browse, upload, download, copy, and delete data from Amazon S3 based on their specific permissions, which you control using AWS identity and security services or custom managed solutions.”