Every year, enterprise IT departments pay a silent, multi-million dollar penalty. I call it the "Storage Tax."
It’s the money you spend keeping data that hasn't been touched in three years on the same high-performance, high-cost storage as your most critical production databases. We do it because migration is scary, refactoring is expensive, and "storage is cheap."
But in the cloud, storage isn't just a infrastructure line item—it’s an operational strategy. If you are migrating to AWS using a "disk-for-disk" mentality (EC2 + EBS), you aren't just missing out on cloud benefits; you’re actively overpaying for inefficiency.
The 80/20 Reality
Data analysis across thousands of enterprise arrays reveals a consistent truth: roughly 80% of your data is "cold." It consists of old snapshots, completed project files, and logs that exist only for compliance.
Going with traditional storage options force you into a corner. You either pay the "Performance" (keeping everything on EBS) or the "Operational Tax" (manually moving files to S3 and breaking application paths).
Why Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is the "Tax Shelter" You Need
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (or FSx for ONTAP) solves this through intelligent built-in tiering. This isn't just a script that moves files. It is an intelligent, block-level engine that differentiates between "Hot" (active) and "Cold" (inactive) data at the 4KB level.
The genius of this architecture is that it happens behind the scenes. To your application, the data never moves. There are no broken links and no "File Not Found" errors. But on your monthly bill, that 80% of cold data is suddenly priced at object storage rates (~$0.02/GB) rather than SSD rates (~$0.12/GB or higher).
The Competitor Gap: Why "Good Enough" is Costing You
When organizations look at alternatives, they often miss the technical nuances that drive TCO:
EBS (gp3): It’s fast, but it’s "pinned." You pay for the provisioned capacity whether you use it or not. There is no native tiering to S3.
Amazon EFS: Fantastic for serverless, but the unit cost for active data is significantly higher than FSx for ONTAP, and it lacks the deduplication and compression engine that further shrinks your footprint.
FSx for Windows: Excellent for pure SMB, but lacks the 4KB block-level granularity of FSx for ONTAP tiering, often resulting in larger, more expensive SSD footprints.
The Strategy: Pivot to Intelligent Storage
If your organization is sitting on petabytes of unstructured data, you are likely the biggest victim of the hidden cost of cold data. By moving to FSx for ONTAP, you aren't just migrating; you’re implementing a self-optimizing data lifecycle.
Stop paying for air. Stop paying for "dark data." It’s time to move your data into a system that works as hard as your budget does.
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