One of the primary challenges with any DR solution is managing the incremental cost of purchasing, configuring, and maintaining additional compute, network, and storage resources just to provide a DR replication and recovery infrastructure. One popular option for protecting critical on-premises virtual resources is to use cloud-hosted virtual resources as the DR replication and recovery infrastructure. Amazon is one example of such a solution that can provide cost-effective resources that are compatible with NetApp ONTAP hosted VM infrastructures.

Amazon introduced its Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) that enables VMware Cloud Foundation within your virtual private cloud (VPC). Amazon EVS provides the resilience and performance of AWS along with familiar VMware software and tools, enabling Amazon EVS vCenters to integrate with your on-premises virtualized infrastructure.

While Amazon EVS comes with included storage resources, using native storage can reduce its effectiveness for organizations with storage-heavy workloads. In these cases, teaming Amazon EVS with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP storage (Amazon FSxN) can provide a more flexible storage solution. In addition, when you are using NetApp ONTAP storage solutions on-premises to host your VMware infrastructure, using Amazon EVS with FSx for ONTAP provides data interoperability and protection features across on-premises and cloud environments.

For information about Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, see Getting started with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.