Deploying Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP in an enterprise environment - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Intended audienceObjectives

Deploying Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP in an enterprise environment

Luigi Seregni, Antonio Aga Rossi, and Giulio Dipace Amazon Web Services (AWS)

August 2023 (document history)

Migrating workloads to the cloud supports organizational growth and helps you adapt to the changing market landscape. Cloud capabilities and features can provide scalability, agility, and resilience, which can increase the level of service for applications.

Every year, new rules and regulations are introduced, such as new International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) standards. Evolving standards often require increased computational power, and this can be difficult to achieve on premises. High performance computing (HPC) applications, which have extremely high storage throughput requirements, are the perfect candidates for migration to the cloud or a hybrid-cloud environment.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a cloud service that supports the high throughput requirements of these HPC applications and is backward compatible with on-premises ONTAP workloads. Using this guide, you can deploy a fully functional FSx for ONTAP solution in an enterprise environment. Enterprise environment means that the guide doesn't focus exclusively on the on FSx for ONTAP service. Instead, it adopts a holistic view and provides considerations for deploying this kind of file system in a complex environment.

This guide also reviews common deployment challenges, such as Active Directory integration, service account deployment, ONTAP command line troubleshooting, and storage virtual machine (SVM) configuration.

The guide provides four different sections:

  • Architecture – This chapter provides an overview of a possible enterprise architecture using FSx for ONTAP, describing the interaction between the different components and the suitable usage patterns.

  • Creating a file system – This section lists all the actions to create a fully working FSx for ONTAP environment. We provide step by step guidelines both to deploy the solution manually.

  • Best practices – This chapter provides recommendations and best practices that are based on lessons learned during the deployment activities of FSx for ONTAP in an enterprise environment.

  • FAQ – This section contains a set of questions that address common concerns about the technology.

Intended audience

This guide is intended to help cloud administrators and architects who need to deploy an FSx for ONTAP solution that supports HPC workloads and Active Directory integration.

Objectives

This guide can help you and your organization do the following:

  • Understand the architecture and deploy a fully functional FSx for ONTAP solution in an enterprise environment

  • Integrate FSx for ONTAP with Active Directory

  • Create a service account to connect FSx for ONTAP to Active Directory in a production environment

  • Manage storage tiers for Amazon FSx

  • Troubleshoot through the ONTAP command line

  • Troubleshoot configuration issues with storage virtual machines (SVMs) (NetApp documentation)

  • Use Service Message Block (SMB) protocol to access data in your FSx for ONTAP file systems