AWS: Lower Cost Storage Classes for Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced Elastic File System (EFS) One Zone storage classes that reduce storage costs by 47% compared to existing EFS storage classes, while delivering the same features and benefits.

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One Zone storage classes redundantly store data within a single Availability Zone (AZ) and are for customers who want cost-optimized file storage options for workloads and applications that do not require the level of availability and durability offered by regional EFS storage classes that redundantly store data across multiple geographically separated AZs. With One Zone storage classes for EFS there are no minimum commitments or up-front fees, and customers pay only for the amount of file system storage used.

Customers use EFS as a simple, serverless, elastic file system with AWS (and on-premises via Direct Connect or AWS VPN) for a range of workloads. Traditionally, EFS storage classes (EFS Standard and EFS Standard-Infrequent Access) store data across multiple, geographically-separated AZs that comprise an AWS Region to offer a high level of availability and durability. Customers use EFS for their business critical applications like SAP and Oracle; however, there are some workloads (e.g. content management, developer applications, etc.) that do not require the multi-AZ availability and durability provided by EFS’s existing storage classes. As a result, these customers either end up paying for more durability and availability than their applications may require, or customers choose to deploy self-managed file systems for these kinds of workloads (resulting in a higher TCO and more time spent on management).

With new One Zone storage classes for EFS, customers have the choice of a simple, serverless, fully managed file system that runs in a single AZ, and that costs 47% less than regional EFS storage classes. They allow customers to achieve a blended storage price of $0.043/GB-month, while also offering higher availability and durability than self-managed file systems. They provide these lower costs while delivering the same elasticity and scalability benefits of EFS Standard and EFS Standard-Infrequent Access, as well as features like lifecycle management, and integration with AWS compute services, including Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Fargate, and Lambda. One Zone storage classes are for developer workloads like build and staging environments, and applications like analytics, simulation, and media transcoding that do not require the highest levels of availability and durability of regional  EFS storage classes. They are also for storing replicas, secondary copies of data residing on-premises, data that can be recreated, and data used by applications with built-in replication and HA features. One Zone for EFS offers 3 storage classes (One Zone and One Zone-Infrequent Access). One Zone file systems are configured with a Lifecycle Management policy of 30 days to automatically and transparently move less frequently used files to the One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class, delivering 92% additional savings on storage costs compared to One Zone storage class.

“When we set out to build Amazon EFS, we designed it with multi-Availability Zone redundancy to deliver the highest levels of durability and availability. We’ve also heard from customers that they’d like a lower cost file strage option for workloads that have lower resiliency requirements,” said Wayne Duso, VP, file, edge, and data services. “Our new One Zone storage classes for Amazon EFS reduce storage costs by almost 50% compared to regional Amazon EFS storage classes, giving our customers an even less expensive file storage option to meet a range of various workloads.“

All EFS storage classes are designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) durability. EFS regional storage classes are designed to provide 99.99% (4 9’s) availability, while One Zone for EFS is designed to provide 99.9% (3 9’s) availability. For added data protection, EFS file systems in One Zone storage classes are automatically backed up using AWS Backup, and can be restored to any AZ within a region, or copied to a different region.

EFS One Zone storage classes are available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), AsiaPac (Hong Kong), AsiaPac (Mumbai), AsiaPac (Seoul), AsiaPac (Singapore), AsiaPac (Sydney), AsiaPac (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Milan), Europe (Stockholm), South America (Sao Paulo), Africa (Cape Town), Middle East (Bahrain), and all AWS GovCloud (US) regions, with more regions coming soon.

Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Capital One Corp. offers a spectrum of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients through a variety of channels.

“Our engineering teams are focused on creating great customer experiences, and they rely on the simplicity and reliability of Amazon EFS for their file system needs,” said Andrew Peskin, director, software engineering, cloud and connectivity, Capital One. “Amazon EFS One Zone will give us additional, lower-cost options for new development, pre-production and test workloads, helping us focus our time, money and energy on developing innovative solutions for our customers instead of managing file storage infrastructure.“

Largest human genomic research efforts, The Regeneron Genetics Center is working to accelerate the development of new therapies for people facing life-threatening conditions.

“Every day we are challenged to make scientific discoveries as quickly as possible to help address some of health’s biggest challenges,” said Jeffrey Reid, VP, Regeneron and chief data officer, Regeneron Genetics Center. “Speed, simplicity, and elasticity matter to our scientists, who work collaboratively on homegrown technologies to translate science into medicine. Amazon EFS delivers on its promise and empowers our team to accelerate their research. Further, Amazon EFS One Zone addresses the needs of many of our research workloads and helps us optimize on storage costs without losing the Amazon EFS features we depend on.“

Qube Research and Technologies Ltd. (QRT) is a technology driven firm implementing a scientific approach to financial investment.

“When you’re a quantitative investment manager that relies on combining data, research and trading expertise to deliver quality returns to your investors, getting the best value out of your own technology infrastructure is critical,” said Jon Fautley, cloud engineer, QRT. “Amazon EFS One Zone allows us to choose additional savings of 47% for HPC analytics workloads that don’t require regional resilience, with all the EFS capabilities that we know and love. Data powers QRT’s innovation dynamic, and EFS One Zone allows us to more efficiently onboard, analyze and evaluate data to deliver high quality returns for our customers.“

Funambol is a provider of cloud solutions to mobile operators and other service providers, with solutions deployed in 50 countries across hundreds of millions of end users.

“Funambol’s goal is to enable service providers to get to market quickly, with white label solutions for personal cloud, business cloud, IOT, and business intelligence,” said Stefano Nichele, director, operations, Funambol. “Our customers count on us to provide reliability, performance, and security for the services we deliver across a wide range of devices, from content management to computer vision. We love the elasticity and simplicity of Amazon EFS, and Amazon EFS One Zone provides the perfect set of capabilities, at the right price, to allow us to develop and deploy new media processing workflows and products for our customers.”

Since 1986, Murex has developed financial technology solutions and spurred growth and innovation in capital markets.

“More than 57,000 daily users around the globe rely on our platform for trading, hedging, funding, risk management, or processing operations,” said Arnaud de Chavagnac, head, cloud, technology and services marketing, Murex. “We are excited about Amazon EFS One Zone and evaluating the TCO and performance impact it can deliver as part of our mission-critical MX.3 platform. The platform requires highly responsive storage technology to execute computation-intensive tasks such as pricing, market risk and xVA management for our customers, including global sell-side financial institutions, local banks, asset managers, hedge funds, large corporations, and energy utilities.“

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