 Welcome back to AWS Storage Day. This is theCUBE's continuous coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. And we're going to talk about file storage. 80% of the world's data is in unstructured storage and most of that is in file format. Devs want infrastructure as code. They want to be able to provision and manage storage through an API and they want that cloud agility. They want to be able to scale up, scale down, pay by the drink. And the big news of Storage Day was really the partnership, deep partnership between AWS and NetApp and with me to talk about that is Ed Name, who's the general manager of Amazon FSX and Anthony Lai. Executive Vice President and GM of Public Cloud at NetApp, two CUBE alums. Great to see you guys again. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us, Dave. So Ed, let me start with you. You launched FSX 2018 at Reinvent. How is it being used today? Well, we've talked about FSX on the CUBE before, Dave, but let me start by recapping that FSX makes it easy to launch and run fully managed, feature rich, high performance file storage in the cloud. And we built FSX from the ground up, really to have the reliability, the scalability you were talking about, the simplicity to support a really wide range of workloads and applications. And with FSX customers choose the file system that powers their file storage with full access to the file systems, feature sets, the performance profiles and the data management capabilities. And so since Reinvent 2018, when we launched this service, we've offered two file system choices for customers. So the first was a Windows file server, and that's really storage built on top of Windows server designed as a really simple solution for Windows applications that require shared storage. And then Luster, which is an open source file system that's the world's most popular high performance file system. And the Amazon FSX model has really resonated strongly with customers for a few reasons. So first, for customers who currently managed network attached storage or NAS on premises, it's such an easy path to move their applications and their application data to the cloud. FSX works and feels like the NAS app appliances that they're used to, but added to all of that are the benefits of a fully managed cloud service. And second, for builders developing modern new apps it helps them deliver fast consistent experiences for Windows and Linux in a simple and an agile way. And then third, for research scientists, its storage performance and its capabilities for dealing with data at scale really make it a no brainer storage solution. And so as a result, the service is being used for a pretty wide spectrum of applications and workloads across industries. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So there's this class of what we call common enterprise IT use cases. So think of things like end user file shares, the corporate IT applications, content management systems, highly available database deployments. And then there's a variety of common line of business and vertical workloads that are running on FSX as well. So financial services, there's a lot of modeling and analytics workloads, life sciences, a lot of genomics analysis, meeting entertainment, rendering and transcoding and visual effects, automotive. We have a lot of electronic control unit simulations and object detection, semiconductor, a lot of EDA, electronic design automation and then oil and gas, seismic data processing, pretty common workload on FSX. And then there's a class of really ultra high performance workloads that are running on FSX as well. Think of things like big data analytics. So SAS grid is a common application, a lot of machine learning model training and then a lot of what people would consider traditional or classic high performance computing or HPC. Great, thank you for that. Just a quick follow up if I may and then I want to bring Anthony into the conversation. So why NetApp, this is not a Barney deal, this is a lot of elbow grease going into a Barney deal, you know, I love you, you love me, we do a press release, but why NetApp, why ONTAP, why now? Good, that was to you. Is that a question? Was that a question for Anthony? No, for you, Ed. And then I want to bring Anthony. Oh, sure, sorry. Okay, sure. Yeah, I mean, David really stemmed from both companies realizing combined offering would be highly valuable to and impactful for customers. In reality, we started collaborating in Amazon and NetApp on the service probably about two years ago and we really had a joint vision that we wanted to provide AWS customers with the full power of ONTAP, the complete ONTAP with every capability and with ONTAP's full performance but fully managed and offered as a full blown AWS native service. So what that would mean is that customers get all of ONTAP's benefits, along with the simplicity and the agility, the scalability, the security and the reliability of an AWS service. Great, thank you. So Anthony, I have watched NetApp reinvent itself, started at a work station, saw you go into the enterprise, and saw you lean into virtual. So you told me at least two years, it might have been three years ago, Dave, we are going all in on the cloud. We're going to lead this next chapter. And so I want you to bring in your perspective. You're reinventing NetApp yet again. What are your thoughts? Well, NetApp and AWS have had a very long relationship. I think it probably dates now about nine years. And what we really wanted to do in NetApp was give the most important constituent of all an experience that helped them progress their business. So ONTAP, the industry's leading shared storage platform, we wanted to make sure that in AWS it was as good as it was on premise. We love the idea of giving customers this wonderful concept of symmetry. You know, ONTAP runs the biggest applications in the largest enterprises on the planet. And we wanted to give not just those customers an opportunity to embrace the Amazon cloud, but we wanted to also extend the capabilities of ONTAP through FSX to a new customer audience, maybe those smaller companies that didn't really purchase on premise infrastructure, people that were born in the cloud. And of course, this gives us a great opportunity to present a fully managed ONTAP within the FSX platform to a lot of non-NetApp customers, to our competitors, customers Dave, that frankly haven't done the same as we've done. And I think we are the benefactors of it and we're in turn passing that innovation, that transformation onto the customers and the partners. You know, one is the key aspect here is that it's a managed service. I don't think that could be overstated. And the other is the cloud nativeness of this. Anthony, you mentioned marketplace is great, but there's some serious engineering going on here. So Ed, maybe start with the perspective of a managed service. I mean, what does that mean, the whole ball of wax? Yeah, I mean, what it means to a customer is they go into the AWS console or they go to the AWS SDK or the AWS CLI and they are easily able to provision a resource, provision a file system and it automatically will get built for them and there's nothing that they need to do at that point. They get an endpoint that they have access to the file system from and that's it. We handle patching, we handle all of the provisioning, we handle any hardware replacements that might need to happen along the way. Everything is fully managed. So the customer really can focus not on managing their file system, but on doing all of the other things that they want to do and that they need to do. So Anthony, in a way, you're disrupting yourself which is kind of what you told me a couple of years ago. You're not afraid to do that because if we don't do it, somebody else is going to do it because you're used to the old days, you're selling a box and you say, we'll see you next time in three or four years. So from your customer standpoint, what's their reaction to this notion of a managed service and what does it mean to NetApp? Well, so I think the most important thing it does is it gives them investment protection. The wonderful thing about what we've built with Amazon in the FSx profile is it's a complete on-tap. And so one on-tap cluster on-premise can immediately see and connect to an on-tap environment under FSx. We can then establish various different connectivities. We can use SNAP mirror technologies for disaster recovery. We can use efficient data transfer for things like DevTest and backup. Of course, the wonderful thing that we've done that we've gone beyond above and beyond what anybody else has done is we want to make sure that the actual primary application itself, one that was sort of built using NAS, built in a non-premise environment, an SAP and Oracle, et cetera, as Ed said, that we can move those over and have the confidence to run the application with no changes on an Amazon environment. So what we've really done, I think, for customers, the NetApp customers, the non-NetApp customers, is we've given them an enterprise-grade shared storage platform that's as good in an Amazon Cloud as it was in an on-premise data center. And that's something that's very unique to us. Can we talk a little bit more about those use cases? Both of you, what are you seeing as some of the more interesting ones that you can share? Ed, maybe you could start. Yeah, happy to. The customer discussions that we've been in have really highlighted four cases, four use cases that customers are telling us they'll use a service for. So maybe I'll cover two, and maybe Anthony can cover the other two. So the first is application migrations. And customers are increasingly looking to move their applications to AWS. And a lot of those applications work with file storage today. And so we're talking about applications like SAP, we're talking about relational databases like SQL Server and Oracle, we're talking about vertical applications like Epic and the healthcare space. As another example, lots of meeting entertainment, rendering and transcoding and visual effects workflows require Windows, Linux and macOS access to the same set of data. And what application administrators really want is they want the easy button. They want fully featured file storage that has the same capabilities, the same performance that their applications are used to, has extremely high availability and durability and can easily enable them to meet compliance and security needs with a robust set of data protection and security capabilities. And I'll give you an example. Accenture, for example, has told us that a key obstacle their clients face when migrating to the cloud is potentially rearchitecting their applications to adopt new technologies. And they expect that Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP will significantly accelerate their customers migrations to the cloud. Then a second one is storage migrations. So storage admins are increasingly looking to extend their on-premises storage to the cloud. And why they want to do that is they want to be more agile and they want to be responsive to growing datasets and growing workload needs. They want elastic capacity. They want the ability to spin up and spin down. They want easy disaster recovery across geographically isolated regions. They want the ability to change performance levels at any time. So all of this goodness that they get from the cloud is what they want. And more of them also are looking to make their company's data accessible to cloud services for analytics and processing. So services like ECS and EKS and Workspaces and AppStream and VMware Cloud and SageMaker and orchestration services like Parallel Cluster and AWS Batch. But at the same time, they want all these cloud benefits, but at the same time they have established data management workflows and they've built processes and they've built automation leveraging APIs and capabilities of on-prem NAS appliances. It's really tough for them to just start from scratch with that stuff. So this offering provides them the best of both worlds. They get the benefits of the cloud with the NAS data management capabilities that they're used to. Great. So Anthony, maybe you want to talk about the other tip. Well, so, you know, first and foremost, you heard from Ed earlier on that the FSX sort of construct and how successful it's been. And one of the real reasons it's been so successful is it takes advantage of all of the latest storage technologies, compute technologies, networking technologies. What's great is all of that's hidden from the user. What FSX does is it delivers a service. And what that means for an on-tap customer is you're going to have on-tap with an SLA and an SLA. You're going to have hundreds of thousands of IOPS available to you and sub-millisecond latencies. What's also really important is the design for FSX for NetApp on-tap was really to provide consistency on the NetApp API and to provide full access to on-tap from the Amazon console, the Amazon SDK or the Amazon CLI. So in this case, you've got this wonderful benefit of all of the sort of the 29 years of innovation of NetApp combined with all the innovation of AWS all presented consistently to a customer. What Ed said, which I'm particularly excited about is customers will see this just as they see any other AWS service. So if they want to use on-tap in combination with some incremental compute resources, maybe with their own encryption keys, maybe with directory services, they may want to use it with other services like SageMaker, all of those things are immediately exposed to Amazon FSX for NetApp on-tap. We do some really intelligent things just in the storage layer. So for example, we do intelligent tiering. So the customer is constantly getting the sort of the best TCO. So what that means is we're using Amazon's S3 storage as a tiered service so that we can back off cold data off of the primary file system to give the customer the optimal capacity the optimal throughput while maintaining the integrity of the file system. It's the same with backup. It's the same with disaster recovery whether we're operating in a hybrid AWS cloud or we're operating in an AWS region or across regions. Well, thank you. I think this announcement is a big deal for a number of reasons. First of all, it's the largest market. Like you said, you're the gold standard. I'll give you that, Anthony because you guys earned it. And so it's a large market but you always had to make previously and have make trade-offs. Either I could do file in the cloud but I didn't get the rich functionality that NetApp's mature stack brings. Or you could have wrapped your stack in the Kubernetes container and thrown it in the cloud and hosted it there but now that it's a managed service and presumably you're underneath you're taking advantage, as I say, my inference is there's some serious engineering going on here. You're taking advantage of some of the cloud native capabilities. Maybe it's the different EC2 types but also being able to bring in we're entering a new data era with machine intelligence and other capabilities that we really didn't have access to last decade. So I want to close with, give you guys the last word. Maybe each of you could give me your thoughts on how you see this partnership in the future particularly from a customer standpoint. Ed, maybe you could start and then Anthony, you can bring us home. Yeah, well, Anthony and I and our teams have gotten to know each other really well in ideating around what this experience will be and then building the product. And we have this common vision that it is something that's going to really move the needle for customers providing the full on-top experience with the power of a native AWS service. So we're really excited. We're in this for the long haul together. We have, we've partnered on everything from engineering to product management to support like the full thing. This is a co-owned effort, a joint effort backed by both companies. And we have a, I think a pretty remarkable product on day one, one that I think is going to delight customers. And we have a really rich roadmap that we're going to be building together over the years. So I'm excited about getting this in customers' hands. Great, thank you. Anthony, bring us home. Well, you know, it's one of those sort of rare chances where you get to do something with Amazon that no one's ever done, you know. We're sort of sitting on the inside. We are a peer of theirs and we're able to develop at very high speeds in combination with them to release continuously to the customer base. So what you're going to see is rapid innovation. You're going to see a whole host of new services, services that Nenna developed, services that Amazon developed. And then the whole ecosystem is going to have access to this, whether they're historically built on the NetApp APIs or increasingly built on the AWS APIs. I think you're going to see orchestrations. I think you're going to see the capabilities expand the overall opportunity for AWS to bring enterprise applications over. For me personally, Dave, you know, I have demonstrated yet again to the NetApp customer base how much we care about them and their future. Selfishly, you know, I'm looking forward to telling the story to my competitors, customer base, because they haven't done it. So, you know, I think we've been bold. I think we've been committed, as you said, three and a half years ago, I promised you that we were going to do everything we possibly could, you know. People always say, you know, what's the real benefit of this? At the end of the day, customers and partners will be the real winners. This innovation, this sort of as a service I think is going to expand our market, allow our customers to do more with Amazon than they could before. It's one of those rare cases, Dave, where I think one plus one equals about seven, really. I love the vision and excited to see the execution. Ed and Anthony, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Congratulations on getting to this point and good luck. Thanks, Dave. Thank you. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS Storage Day, keep it right there.