As businesses become increasingly reliant on data, storage needs become a more prevalent concern.

Ensuring flexible, efficient and affordable file storage is no easy undertaking, so many companies have turned to managed services like Amazon Elastic File System, or EFS.

“What we’ve found in talking to customers … they’re not typically storage specialists,” explains Duncan Lennox (pictured), general manager of Amazon EFS. “They don’t want to have to know or learn a lot about the bowels of storage architecture and how to optimize for what their applications need. They want to focus on solving the business problems they’re focused on.”

Lennox spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Storage Day event. They discussed how Amazon EFS can minimize administrative work and costs while offering flexible, scalable file storage. (* Disclosure below.)

Automatic scaling and optimization

Different workloads have various file storage needs. Optimizing storage requires a delicate and frequently shifting balance between cost, performance, space and availability. Tuning systems manually to meet those needs is time-consuming and requires expertise that organizations may lack. Automating these considerations through EFS provides a way forward, according to Lennox.

“We’re providing the scale of capacity, of performance that customer applications need as they need it, without the customer needing to know exactly how to configure the service,” Lennox explained. “Customers don’t need to worry about how they performance-tune or how they cost-optimize. We deliver that value for them.”

Taking this optimization further, EFS recently announced Intelligent-Tiering. This service automatically transfers files between performance-optimized and cost-optimized storage based on access patterns. As a result, businesses can scale and reduce costs without extensive file service knowledge, according to Lennox.

“We automatically monitor every access to every file they have. And if we see no access to a file for their policy period … we automatically and transparently move that file to one of our cost-optimized storage classes,” Lennox said. “So they can save up to 92% on their storage costs.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Storage Day event. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Storage Day. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE