AWS Announces New Lower Cost Storage Classes for Amazon Elastic File System 

SEATTLE, March 10, 2021 -- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced new Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone storage classes that reduce storage costs by 47% compared to existing Amazon EFS storage classes, while delivering the same features and benefits. One Zone storage classes redundantly store data within a single Availability Zone (AZ) and are ideal 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 Amazon EFS storage classes that redundantly store data across multiple geographically separated AZs. With One Zone storage classes for Amazon EFS there are no minimum commitments or up-front fees, and customers pay only for the amount of file system storage used. To get started with One Zone storage classes for Amazon EFS visit http://aws.amazon.com/efs/.

Customers use Amazon EFS as a simple, serverless, elastic file system with AWS (and on-premises via AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN) for a broad range of workloads. Traditionally, Amazon EFS storage classes (EFS Standard and EFS Standard-Infrequent Access) store data across multiple, geographically-separated AZs that comprise an AWS Region to offer the highest level of availability and durability. Customers use Amazon 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 Amazon 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 Amazon EFS, customers now have the choice of a simple, serverless, fully managed file system that runs in a single AZ, and that costs 47% less than regional Amazon EFS storage classes. One Zone storage classes 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. One Zone storage classes provide these lower costs while delivering the same elasticity and scalability benefits of Amazon EFS Standard and EFS Standard-Infrequent Access, as well as features like lifecycle management, and integration with AWS compute services, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. One Zone storage classes are ideal 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 Amazon EFS storage classes. One Zone storage classes are also ideal for storing replicas, secondary copies of data residing on-premises, data that can be easily recreated, and data used by applications with built-in replication and high availability features. One Zone for Amazon EFS offers two 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 storage option for workloads that have lower resiliency requirements,” said Wayne Duso, Vice President of File, Edge, and Data Services, AWS. “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 Amazon EFS storage classes are designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) durability. Amazon EFS regional storage classes are designed to provide 99.99% (4 9’s) availability, while One Zone for Amazon EFS is designed to provide 99.9% (3 9’s) availability. For added data protection, Amazon 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. Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes are available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (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 offers a broad 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.”

One of the world’s largest human genomic research efforts, The Regeneron Genetics Center is working to rapidly 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, Vice President at Regeneron and Chief Data Officer at the 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.”

About Amazon Web Services

For almost 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 80 Availability Zones (AZs) within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

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Source: AWS