From what I've been able to find, the customer has to own the NTAP unit in their facility, as well as the one in the Equinix DC, pay for the necessary licenses/features they want, etc - basically all "normal" things that are done currently. From there, the remote unit is in a "zone" w/Amazon that has access to EC2/S3 so they can spin up VMs in the case of EC2, or use CommVault (and perhaps some others) to replicate off of the secondary unit into S3.

Someone from NetApp will have to chime in and correct me where I'm wrong though :)

Nov 29, 2012 01:58:24 PM, skreuzer@freebsd.org wrote:

So NetApp just announced this: http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20121128-693554.html

I am not familiar with Amazon 's offerings, but it sounds like you can stick a filer in certain datacenters have your clients continue to access a primary filer via nfs or cifs and then snapmirror that filer to a secondary filer that magically writes it to the cloud?

The details are a bit light from what I have been abe to find online, so I am curious if anyone has any additional information.

Thanks