Unleashing the Potential of Amazon FSx with Datadobi’s StorageMAP

A global leader in artificial intelligence and computer graphics recently came to us with a common lament: “We have a mess. We need to understand the mess. We need to clean up the mess.”

More specifically, the customer had made the decision to migrate their SAP workloads to Amazon FSx.  With its focus on simplicity and cost-effectiveness, Amazon FSx simplifies the process of launching, running, and expanding feature-rich and high-performance file systems in the cloud. It offers a broad range of capabilities, ensuring reliability, security, and scalability for various workloads. Leveraging cutting-edge AWS compute, networking, and disk technologies, Amazon FSx delivers exceptional performance while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). As a fully managed service, it takes care of hardware provisioning, patching, and backups, allowing you to devote your attention to your applications, end users, and business objectives.

However, there was a critical concern. Like most enterprise organizations today, the customer had experienced a virtual explosion in its unstructured data, and for cost, security, and privacy reasons, the company needed to prevent the migration of redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data to the new environment. Consequently, prior to initiating the transfer of any data to AWS, it was imperative for the customer to gain a comprehensive understanding of their data and not only identify the datasets to be migrated but also detect any orphaned data. Then and only then, the next step could be undertaken – that is the task of reorganizing the data and executing a seamless migration that would have minimal impact on any of the customer’s business units. And, as an added requirement, precise real-time reporting was required that would keep all stakeholders up to date on each phase of the initiative.

How StorageMAP Empowered our Customer’s Decision-Making

We collaborated closely with the customer to determine the best approach to leverage the features and functionality of StorageMAP in order to assess their data environment comprehensively. Apart from the pre-built functionality, we offered them the opportunity to customize analytics and reporting, enabling them to gain unique insights specific to their environment. For instance, with StorageMAP’s Active Directory (AD) integration, the customer was able to identify all orphaned data.

As StorageMAP analyzed and organized the customer’s data, it generated reports that were easy to understand. These reports, which included helpful graphs and tables, provided valuable insights into the customer’s data landscape. With this clear understanding, the customer was able to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently regarding how to best organize and migrate their data.

And, as an added benefit, the customer was able to communicate their findings with their business units with reporting that made it easy to illustrate not only the status of each phase, but the associated data storage expense/savings as well.

Driving Success with StorageMAP and Amazon FSx

Once the customer identified the data to be migrated, the AWS account team collaborated with them to determine the ideal data structure within Amazon FSx. This collaboration ensured a clear understanding of how the data should be organized and structured during the migration process, eliminating any confusion or ambiguity.

StorageMAP proved invaluable to the customer by saving them a significant amount of time, totaling hundreds of hours. It offered unique insights into their data landscape that no other solution could provide. The combination of these insights and reporting to the relevant stakeholders enabled the customer to devise an efficient migration strategy, which they successfully implemented with the support of StorageMAP. The customer valued the swift adoption of Amazon FSx, and StorageMAP stood out as the only solution that could deliver end-to-end analysis, reporting, planning, and execution speed, fulfilling their specific requirements.

Following the seamless migration of the pertinent data to Amazon FSx, the customer swiftly leveraged the extensive array of powerful features offered by AWS. This accelerated realization exceeded their initial expectations, leaving them deeply impressed by the rapid and profound transformation made possible through the combination of StorageMAP and AWS.