Optimizing costs with Amazon FSx
FSx for Windows File Server provides several features to help you optimize your total cost of ownership (TCO) based on your application needs. You can pick the storage type (HDD or SSD) to achieve the right balance of cost and performance needs for your application. You have the flexibility to pick throughput capacity separately from the amount of storage capacity to optimize your costs. And, you can use data deduplication to optimize storage costs by eliminating redundant data on your file system.
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Flexibility to choose storage and throughput independently
With FSx for Windows File Server, you can configure your file system's storage, SSD IOPS, and throughput capacities independently. This gives you flexibility to achieve the right mix of cost and performance. For example, you can choose to have a large amount of storage with a relatively small amount of throughput capacity for cold (generally inactive) workloads to save on unneeded throughput costs. Or, as another example, you could choose to have a large amount of throughput capacity for a relatively small amount of storage capacity. Higher throughput capacity comes with higher amounts of memory for caching on the file server. You can take advantage of fast caching on the file server to optimize performance for actively accessed data. For more information, see FSx for Windows File Server performance.
You can increase the amount of storage capacity anytime after you create a file system. For more information, see Managing storage capacity. You can scale SSD IOPS independently of storage capacity anytime after you create a file system. For more information, see Managing SSD IOPS. You can increase or decrease the amount of throughput capacity at any time, providing the flexibility to address changing performance needs. For more information, see Managing throughput capacity.
Optimizing storage costs
You can optimize your storage costs with Amazon FSx in a variety of ways, described as follows.
Optimizing costs using storage types
FSx for Windows File Server provides two types of storage—hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state
drives (SSD)—to enable you to optimize cost/performance to meet your workload needs. HDD
storage is designed for a broad spectrum of workloads, including home directories, user and
departmental shares, and content management systems. SSD storage is designed for the
highest-performance and most latency-sensitive workloads, including databases, media processing
workloads, and data analytics applications. For more information, see Latency
and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Pricing
Optimizing storage costs using data deduplication
Large datasets often have redundant data, which increases data storage costs. For example, user file shares can have multiple copies of the same file, stored by multiple users. Software development shares can contain many binaries that remain unchanged from build to build. You can reduce your data storage costs by turning on data deduplication for your file system. When it's turned on, data deduplication automatically reduces or eliminates redundant data by storing duplicated portions of the dataset only once. For more information about data deduplication, and how to easily turn it on for your Amazon FSx file system, see Data deduplication.
Reviewing Usage and Billing
You can review your file system usage, including your storage capacity, throughput capacity, backup, and data transfer, using the Amazon Billing Dashboard or the Amazon Cost Explorer. These tools allow you to review usage of your resources, and filter and group by usage type, region, and other relevant criteria. Note that in order to view usage for a single file system or single file system backup, you will need to enable tags for that specific resource and enable tag-based billing reporting. For more information, see Using Amazon cost allocation tags in the Amazon Billing user guide.