Beyond Basic Block Storage: Transforming Migration ROI with FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Moving enterprise workloads to the cloud is a complex undertaking. For IT leaders tasked with migrating VMware environments and sprawling databases, the compute side of the equation is often straightforward. The real challenge—and the hidden risk to your budget—lies in the storage architecture.

All too often, organizations rely on generic assessment tools or manual spreadsheets to plan their cloud migrations. These methods typically default to standard block storage options, like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), without accounting for the sophisticated storage behaviors of enterprise applications. The result? A post-migration architecture that either misses performance expectations or introduces unnecessary long-term costs.

To truly optimize your cloud ROI, you need clarity before you move a single byte. You need an assessment that looks beyond basic block storage and models your workloads against enterprise-grade solutions.

The Problem with "Default" Cloud Storage

Migrating VMware and database workloads is rarely a simple lift-and-shift. These environments rely on shared datastores, demand consistent IOPS, and are highly sensitive to latency.

When you over-provision high-performance block storage for all your data—including years of infrequently accessed, cold data—you are essentially leaving money on the table. Treating enterprise storage features as post-migration optimizations often means scrambling to acquire third-party tools later to fix performance gaps or cost overruns.

The Matilda Differentiator: Storage-Aware Modeling

To solve this, we are proud to highlight our integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN). As outlined in a recent NetApp Community blog, Matilda Cloud delivers an AI-powered platform that moves past generic sizing ratios.

Instead of guessing, Matilda's automated tools discover your current environment and map observed workload behavior directly to FSxN configuration constructs. We are the first AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) certified tool to offer this specific integration.

Transforming Migration ROI with FSxN

Why model FSxN? Because it brings the robust, enterprise-grade capabilities of NetApp ONTAP natively to AWS. By assessing how your workloads will perform on FSxN before deployment, you can unlock massive business value:

• Transform Your Storage Costs: FSxN optimizes storage costs by leveraging thin provisioning, meaning you only pay for the used storage. Furthermore, you benefit from compression, deduplication, and compaction to maximize efficiency while minimizing costs.

• Intelligent Data Tiering: You can define policies to automatically move cold data to a lower-cost capacity tier based on data access patterns, ensuring high-performance storage is reserved only for active data.

• Security by Design: FSxN provides isolated data and security per tenant (multitenancy). It creates immutable snapshots and offers automated ransomware protection (ARP) that leverages AI to identify potential malicious behavior.

• Improved Data Protection: The service improves data protection efficiency and compliance with ONTAP’s space-efficient Snapshots. It also supports Multi-AZ for business-critical workloads with synchronous replication across Availability Zones, resulting in highly available and durable storage.

• Maximize AWS Synergies: Being a first-party, native AWS service means FSxN is sold, supported, fully managed, and built by AWS. This allows organizations to seamlessly apply their existing AWS credits to their storage infrastructure.

The Proof is in the Assessment

The financial impact of proper storage modeling is significant. In anonymized customer assessments conducted using Matilda Cloud, FSx for ONTAP configurations have shown cost advantages of up to 40% compared to alternative AWS storage options.

We aren't the only ones recognizing this value. Our partners are already leveraging this integration to drive results. For example, Apps Associates is already helping organizations identify how to evaluate enterprise storage features upfront, allowing them to realize immediate ROI and right-size their deployments on AWS from day one.

Take the Guesswork Out of Your Cloud Journey

Don't let your cloud migration become an expensive rework. By grounding your architectural choices in workload-level data and storage-aware modeling, you can commit to a migration strategy with absolute certainty.

Contact us today to learn how you can run an AWS-funded, Matilda-driven assessment to see your exact projected savings on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.