Migration & Modernization
Enhance your Migration Evaluator business case using Storage Insights and a Storage Assessment
Migration Evaluator is a complimentary guided migration assessment service provided by AWS. The assessment can collect data and utilization about your on-premises servers using an agentless collector, or by using your existing data through a manual process. Using that gathered data, Migration Evaluator recommends best-fit Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) server instances for each server in scope, and builds a directional business case for migrating to AWS. The results are shared in a directional business case in a PowerPoint slide deck, and supporting data in an Excel spreadsheet. By default, all servers in scope are modelled to Amazon EC2 instances with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage volumes.
Customers migrating their on-premises workloads to AWS often have storage in the range of tens to hundreds of terabytes, presented by either dedicated storage appliances, or by servers.
AWS has a wide range of block, file, and object storage services. Choosing the right storage service for your workload is an important decision that can directly impact the projected costs. That’s where Migration Evaluator Storage Assessment comes in; it provides recommendations and TCO analyses for this storage.
The Storage Assessment can use data that has been collected by Migration Evaluator, complemented with data collected by an additional tool or manually, depending on your on-premises environment. There is also an option of running a storage only, standalone assessment. All types of storage can be assessed; block, file, object and backup/archive storage.
A common pattern when running Migration Evaluator assessments is that a small number of servers, often used as file or backup servers, hold a disproportionately large amount of storage. In this blog post I’ll show you how to use Storage Insights in the Migration Evaluator business case to identify and optimize these servers. I’ll highlight the benefits of modeling these servers to a suitable storage service and explain how to request a Storage Assessment alongside your Migration Evaluator assessment.
How to identify and model file and backup servers in a Migration Evaluator assessment
Let’s look at a common situation where a Migration Evaluator assessment has been delivered. The assessment detected that one or more of the servers in scope has a large amount of attached storage – these servers will often be storing files, backups, or both.
A new feature in the Migration Evaluator business case called Storage Insights will identify these servers and provide optimization opportunities:
Figure 1 – Storage Insights slide in the Migration Evaluator business case
As you can see in Figure 1, in this example one server accounts for 45% of all modelled storage. In a standard business case this server is modelled to EC2 and EBS, with an estimated cost of $115,600 USD. In our two common scenarios of file and backup servers, the costs could be reduced by modelling the storage to the most appropriate storage service such as Amazon FSx or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
To view the associated servers and the amount of storage they have, review your input data. The information can also be found in Migration Evaluator Quick Insights or business case data export files, using a filter to find servers with a large amount of storage attached:
Figure 2 – Viewing server data in the Quick Insights report
The example shown in Figure 2 does indeed look like a file server, based on the amount of provisioned storage and hostname, so this would be a strong candidate for the Storage Assessment to suggest a more suitable solution and reduce the costs in the business case.
Using the “FileNAS Storage” sheet in the Migration Evaluator data import template (available from the Migration Evaluator Resources page), I can populate it with as much information as I have on this server. If I didn’t have any details at this stage, I could leave them blank and default values based on previous assessments would be used by the Migration Evaluator team. In the example the server has ~100 TB provisioned, but I know that only ~80 TB of storage is used:
Figure 3 – Completing the Migration Evaluator data import template
This file can now be uploaded to the Migration Evaluator console for the relevant engagement, and the assigned AWS Solutions Architect will process it to complete the assessment.
Results and benefits
The AWS Solutions Architect assigned to your assessment will model this storage to a suitable file system based on your requirements. In this example, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP has been selected for modelling, as both CIFS and NFS protocols are required. The following figure shows an example output for our business case, by modelling the ~80 TB used storage (the remaining ~20 TB on-prem capacity is unused space):
Figure 4 – Storage Assessment slide for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
This is a significant cost reduction of around $90,600 USD or nearly 80%. Using a fully managed service such based on an Amazon FSx managed filesystem, in this case Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, also presents additional benefits:
- Migrating to an EC2 instance is no longer required: there is no need to migrate the server to an EC2 instance or maintain, patch and license its operating system.
- Your data can be stored on tiered storage, intelligently caching frequently accessed data to SSD, and storing infrequently accessed data on HDD.
- The data is compressed and de-duplicated.
- Flexible performance – throughput level and IOPS are configurable based on your requirements.
- The storage benefits from improved durability, as FSx for NetApp ONTAP automatically replicates your data within an Availability Zone to protect it from component failure.
- The architecture can be changed to use multi-AZ if greater durability and availability are required – see availability and durability.
- You pay only for used storage rather than provisioned storage; avoiding difficult decisions around hardware refresh and capacity planning.
Although FSx for NetApp ONTAP was used in this example, each Storage Assessment will recommend and model suitable storage service(s) based on the specific requirements and use case.
A useful comparison of the different Amazon FSx file systems can be found at Choosing an Amazon FSx File System.
Conclusion
In this blog post, I have discussed how the Storage Insights slide in the Migration Evaluator business case can be used to identify servers with large storage. By completing the data import template, these can then be modelled to appropriate storage services using a complimentary Storage Assessment. This ensures that the business case uses the best storage for your workloads, optimizing the cost and improving the quality of your business case.
If you are considering migrating data to AWS, a migration assessment with Migration Evaluator and a Storage Assessment is a great place to start. To request a Migration Evaluator assessment, follow the procedure on the Migration Assessment Request page. Once in contact with the team, request a Storage Assessment, or for an existing assessment contact your assigned AWS Solutions Architect or contact the Migration Assessment team.
To learn more about AWS Migration Evaluator and building a migration business case, please refer to the following resources: