FSx for ONTAP storage tiers - FSx for ONTAP

FSx for ONTAP storage tiers

Storage tiers are the physical storage media for an Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file system. FSx for ONTAP offers the following storage tiers:

  • SSD tier – The user-provisioned, high-performance solid-state drive (SSD) storage that’s purpose-built for the active portion of your data set.

  • Capacity pool tier – Fully elastic storage that automatically scales to petabytes in size, and is cost-optimized for your infrequently accessed data.

An FSx for ONTAP volume is a virtual resource that, similar to folders, doesn't consume storage capacity. The data that you store—and that consumes physical storage—lives inside volumes. When you create a volume, you specify its size—which you can modify after it's created. FSx for ONTAP volumes are thin provisioned, and file system storage is not reserved in advance. Instead, SSD and capacity pool storage are allocated dynamically, as needed. A tiering policy, which you configure at the volume level, determines if and when data that's stored in the SSD tier transitions to the capacity pool tier.

The following diagram illustrates an example of data laid out across multiple FSx for ONTAP volumes in a file system.

FSx for ONTAP SSD and capacity pool storage tiers logically provisioned across file system volumes.

The following diagram illustrates how the file system's physical storage capacity is consumed by the data in the four volumes in the previous diagram.

FSx for ONTAP file system SSD and capacity pool storage tier physical storage capacity usage across volumes.

You can reduce your storage costs by choosing the tiering policy that best meets the requirements for each volume on your file system. For more information, see Volume data tiering.