Amazon FSx vs Azure NetApp Files comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NetApp are both solutions in the Cloud Storage category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.3, while NetApp is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.2. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.3% mindshare in CS, compared to NetApp’s 8.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Amazon FSx

Read 3 Amazon FSx reviews

213 Views
177 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Azure NetApp Files

Read 16 Azure NetApp Files reviews

1,955 Views
1,231 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Amazon FSx

Azure NetApp Files

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon FSx and Azure NetApp Files based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon FSx vs. Azure NetApp Files Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon FSx vs. Azure NetApp Files

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon FSx

Ranking in Cloud Storage

14th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File System Software (5th), File and Object Storage (17th)

Azure NetApp Files

Ranking in Cloud Storage

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (3rd), Public Cloud Storage Services (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Cloud Storage category, the mindshare of Amazon FSx is 2.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure NetApp Files is 8.8%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Storage

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan

Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group

Shared storage capabilities provide enterprise value with good reliability

Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS. The auto-scaling feature should be improved, as it currently includes downtime. I need to manually increase the storage, which is not ideal. Integrating FSx with Windows Server is challenging; it's a long process involving Active Directory (AD) setup and synchronization.

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Vladislav Malicevic

CTO at Jedox

We can expand our storage on-the-fly without the need to reprovision

Ease of provisioning: It's very easy to consume the product. We are not doing this manually. We are doing this programmatically, but it's very easy and seamless for us to consume it. It's like any other Azure component. It's very good and well-integrated into the ecosystem of Azure. There is tight integration. We didn't need to learn anything new. It feels like we know everything already, although under the hood, the product is something totally different. However, it seemed very easy for us. It's elastic, so it scales with our demands. We can start small, then with the addition of customer loads, we can expand on-the-fly without the need to reprovision something. The performance is quite good, so it's almost on par with the make of SSD storage. It provides a quick, scalable storage solution. We were looking for a supported solution. We didn't want to experiment. We didn't want to look for open source, though we did look into open source initially before we bumped into NetApp. We figured out that adding yet another unknown into our system was not going to bring us benefit. It would be another problem that we would need to tackle. So, we said, "Okay, let's look for a supported solution," and NetApp was one of them. Then, we turned to NetApp.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I rate the stability of Amazon FSx ten out of ten."

"We used it for disaster recovery perspective behind a number of resources, like batch services and RDS."

"FSx operates as an independent service, not tied to any server, which eliminates dependencies between applications for storage."

"The shared storage capability is highly valuable."

"You can change it non-disruptively. You can increase the size and decrease the size online, which is a huge benefit compared to Azure disks. It just works seamlessly. You don't need to stop the instances."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its flexibility."

"It has saved a lot of time. Because in the older, conventional hardware system, they need to raise a ticket to go to storage engineering, then storage engineering would increased the size. Now, it's dynamic. You don't have to do anything. This improved the time by more than 50 percent."

"Azure NetApp Files has been stable."

"This solution definitely makes us more efficient in being able to provide storage quickly to our customers in the Azure Cloud."

"I think the easiest part is, when you do a comparison, it is the throughput versus the cost. And it's much easier to set up."

"The critical features of this solution are SnapMirror for replication, data protection, and SnapLock."

"I like the SnapMirror feature in Azure NetApp Files. It helps me create backups with snapshots and makes data recovery and compression."

More Azure NetApp Files pros

Cons

"Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS."

"A direct FTP feature would be beneficial instead of relying on transmission services."

"I've been facing a challenge when doing a failover from FSx side. AWS console does not refresh within a half hour."

"Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS."

"We would like for the files which are coming in that we can version them. So, if a file is accidentally deleted, there should have a recycle bin option where we can go back, and at least once, clean it up."

"The main hurdle in promoting this solution is the price. Its price definitely requires an improvement. It is more expensive than other options, so customers go for a cheaper option."

"The main area for improvement is in the support ticket system. Since it's a SaaS platform, support tickets are managed by Microsoft or NetApp backend. This can sometimes lead to cross-functional challenges for organizations."

"I would like to see multi-zone redundancy so that I don't have to worry about it. I just back up my data to that one SMB share and I know that it's replicated to a different region."

"The pricing definitely needs to be improved."

"Azure NetApp Files could improve by being more diverse to integrate better with other solutions, such as Splunk and the on-premise version. There are some use cases that are not covered natively by Azure. It is not the best solution because it is not external from the cloud which for me is the best type of solution."

"The deployment process is somewhat complex compared to other storage solutions."

"This solution would be improved with more innovation."

More Azure NetApp Files cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The lowest price I have paid is $370 or $380 per month, while the highest can exceed $3,000 per month."

"Its price is double the price of the premium disks, which is the main reason why customers don't go for this solution in the end."

"In the cloud, pricing depends on how you manage it. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's all about optimizing charges and showing the cost back. So, it's more about managing the expenses rather than being inherently expensive or cheap."

"We are currently on a pay-as-you-go model with the storage that we use."

"The pricing depends on your scaling and consumption."

"The price of Azure NetApp Files could be better."

"The performance has improved by about 30 percent."

"The solution’s combination of the ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost has helped a lot. It is very fast to deploy. It's very easy to maintain. You don't have to do a lot in the cloud to maintain this thing, so it gives good performance. It's fast to deploy, easy to maintain, and it gives a better performance. These are the most basic three criteria for any application. This saves cost because the manpower you need to deploy is going down. You're getting better performance and not buying new resources. You have resources available in the cloud. It's just a couple of clicks, then you're good to go."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

More Azure NetApp Files pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

35%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon FSx?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon FSx?

I use Amazon FSx as a shared storage service for Windows, particularly when there are multiple Windows servers and a need for shared storage. I use it when shared resources with different servers, ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Amazon FSx?

I must be aware of my specific use case and choose the solution accordingly. I use FSx when shared storage is required without the need for internet connectivity. It is cheaper to use Amazon S3 whe...

See all answers

How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?

Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Azure NetApp Files?

The availability is good, meaning downtime or network issues rarely occur. The system also offers flexibility, allowing for increases in data volume, IOPS, and other capabilities without requiring ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure NetApp Files?

The solution's competitors like Oracle or Amazon are not cheap either. I think we're paying two million dollars for Azure NetApp Files. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is exp...

See all answers

Comparisons

WekaFS vs Amazon FSx

Compared 33% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Amazon FSx

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Amazon FSx

Compared 12% of the time

Nasuni vs Amazon FSx

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Amazon FSx

Compared 10% of the time

More Amazon FSx Competitors

Microsoft Azure File Storage vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 40% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 26% of the time

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 9% of the time

Nasuni vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 7% of the time

NetApp ONTAP vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 3% of the time

More Azure NetApp Files Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Storage

January 2025

Download Amazon FSx product report

Buyer's Guide

Azure NetApp Files

February 2025

Download Azure NetApp Files product report

Also Known As

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre

NetApp ANF, ANF

Overview

Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch and run popular file systems. With Amazon FSx, you can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely-used open source and commercially-licensed file systems, while avoiding time-consuming administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, and backups. It provides cost-efficient capacity and high levels of reliability, and it integrates with other AWS services so that you can manage and use the file systems in cloud-native ways.

Amazon FSx provides you with two file systems to choose from: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for enterprise workloads and Amazon FSx for Lustre for high-performance workloads.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Azure NetApp Files is designed for unstructured data, virtualized SAP systems, SQL backups, NFS and CIFS protocols, Azure Virtual Desktop storage, and optimizing file share services. It supports high performance and networking integration in Microsoft Azure.

Azure NetApp Files offers features such as SnapMirror for data protection, rapid provisioning, elastic scaling, and ultra-fast SQL backup and restore. It provides a seamless experience with fast snapshotting, high availability, security, and ease of setup. Users benefit from significant performance improvements and the ability to manage substantial workload migrations effortlessly. This service is ideal for environments like Azure Kubernetes Service and cloud EPM platforms, where speed, flexibility, and performance are crucial.

What are the key features?

Flexibility: Adaptable to diverse storage needs.
Rapid response time: Ensures quick data access and operations.
SnapMirror: Provides replication and data protection.
SEC compliance: SnapLock ensures regulatory adherence.
Ultra-fast SQL backup: Quicker backup and restore operations.
Elastic scaling: Easily adjusts resources based on demand.
Fast snapshotting: Enables quick data snapshots.
High availability: Ensures consistent data access.
Security: Robust measures for data protection.

What are the expected benefits and ROI?

Performance: Notable improvement in processing speeds.
Simplicity of setup: Easy deployment and configuration.
Scalable management: Handles significant workload migrations with ease.
Cost efficiency: Allows comparing throughput versus cost effectively.

Azure NetApp Files is implemented in various industries requiring robust file storage solutions, from educational environments where performance boosts are critical to businesses leveraging Azure Kubernetes Service for containerized applications. It supports high-demand environments, optimizing data management and improving efficiency.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Neiman Marcus, T Mobile, Docxellent, Matrix, Lyell

SAP, Restaurant Magic

Buyer's Guide

Amazon FSx vs. Azure NetApp Files

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon FSx vs. Azure NetApp Files

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