NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, and AWS, the World's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, have announced an amplified strategic alliance aimed at assisting Australian businesses in keeping up with the current pace of innovation, particularly in sectors requiring significant data-processing. The two tech behemoths are now offering a co-branded FSxN solution, designed to deliver a nine times performance increase both on-premise and in the cloud, to help businesses prioritise data localisation and data sovereignty.

Stephen Persoglia, Director of Partners ANZ at NetApp, said, “The growing appetite for solutions that support data localisation in Australia means that we have three of the largest FSxN customers worldwide. Our base includes agencies in critical industries such as health, transport, retail and energy, largely due to regulatory requirements for sensitive data.”

Over the past year, NetApp and AWS have built a joint pipeline through AWS immersion days, interacting with over 100 customers and partners. The alliance earned AWS NetApp's Alliance Partner of the Year Award at its A/NZ Partner Awards earlier this month.

The augmented collaboration has led to the development of a new feature, the scale-out FSx for ONTAP file systems. This feature imparts up to nine times higher storage performance compared to existing systems, thus enabling customers to run high-performance applications on AWS more quickly and efficiently.

Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp said, “To keep up with the current pace of innovation, especially in areas requiring vast data-processing, organisations need scalable storage. We're focused on increasing the performance and scale for these innovative workloads while retaining strong data management capabilities to power Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP."

Edward Naim, General Manager of File Storage at AWS, emphasised the unprecedented advantage for customers. He stated, “With scale-out FSx for ONTAP file systems, customers can now bring and run their most compute-intensive ONTAP workloads to AWS without needing to change how they manage their data.”

Sector experts, like David Miller, Senior Director & Fellow, IT Architecture at Arm, express confidence about the potential of this new capability. He said, “In testing the new Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we’re successfully leveraging the benefits of the cloud to unlock a new set of scale-out storage capabilities and higher performance for our internal high-performance computing workloads.”

Moreover, these new capabilities are expected to open up fresh use cases for NetApp and AWS. Juan Orlandini, CTO North America at Insight Enterprises, expressed optimism, stating the performance enhancements of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP will enable customers in the top industries to optimise their generative AI, chip design simulation, statistical computing, analytics edge computing, and high-performance computing workloads.

The scale-out capabilities of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP are currently available in several AWS regions, including US East (Ohio, North Virginia); US West (Oregon); Europe (Ireland); and Asia Pacific (Sydney).