Fujifilm slashes TCO by 55% over five years by moving on-premises scale-out NAS to Azure NetApp Files

The scale-out NAS cloud lift delayed due to cost

The Fujifilm Group has been a leader in photography since its founding in 1934, continuously providing new value by adapting its business portfolio to changing market needs. Fujifilm Software was established in 1990 and plays a pivotal role as the group’s core software developer. The company has been progressively moving the systems that support its photo imaging business to the cloud.

According to Kensuke Mizoguchi of Fujifilm Software’s Software Development Division, “Our photo imaging business offers many printing services including digital photo printing (photo books, interior goods, and merchandise using your favorite photos) and calendars, New Year's cards, and postcards.” In addition to these consumer services, the company also offers services for professional photographers. “We ran 153 virtual machines on 69 on-premises machines for a system providing 80 services.”

Having operated the on-premises system since 2006, the company believed that upgrading the aging system would require a massive investment and began examining moving to the cloud in 2019. After exploring systems that could meet their needs, the Fujifilm Software team decided to move to the cloud.

An important aspect to consider when selecting a cloud service is the ability to lift applications to the cloud with as little modification as possible. Based on this requirement, the company adopted Azure.

“Many of the systems we migrated were running on Windows Server and using Microsoft SQL Server for databases,” says Mizoguchi. “To lift these as is, Azure — which offers excellent Windows Server compatibility — was the undeniable option. And, with Azure, we can use a PaaS version of SQL Server for cost advantages.”

Fujifilm Software migrated servers to the cloud and adopted a platform as a service (PaaS) version of Microsoft SQL Server in 2021. However, it chose to run a hybrid cloud configuration by leaving NAS for storing photo data on-premises.

According to Mizoguchi, “We also considered moving our on-premises Isilon (now Dell PowerScale) scale-out NAS to the cloud but there was no cost-effective solution at the time for the performance and capacity we needed. Since photo imaging is the main revenue stream of the Fujifilm Group, we were sensitive to cost increases due to competition with other companies. At the time Azure NetApp Files was not yet a service in the Japan region.”

Azure NetApp Files offers dynamic performance adjustment for optimized costs

Mizoguchi believed that the scale-out NAS should eventually move to the cloud, and the company authorized the shift in 2022. The on-premises shared data center running the scale-out NAS was scheduled to be decommissioned in October 2023.

“This gave us another reason to consider the cloud for the scale-out NAS,” says Nobukazu Fujimura, a research manager in the Software Development Division. Again, the ultimate factor was achieving cost benefits while maintaining performance. The company examined Azure NetApp Files once more. 

Fujimura explains, “The first step was to consider adopting cost-effective object storage. However, the limitations of interoperability with legacy systems at production sites meant it wasn’t feasible to modernize all applications. Consumers mainly use our photo imaging services during the graduation season and the end of the year, so we wanted the ability to change performance dynamically. Azure NetApp Files makes this easy. We also liked the ability to set performance values for each service, and the fact that Azure NetApp Files supports both Common Internet File System, Server Message Block (SMB) for Windows and Network File System (NFS) for Linux on Azure.”

Fujifilm Software conducted a proof of concept for Azure NetApp Files in February 2022 to validate performance for their use cases and its safety for use in consumer services before formal adoption.

“We picked the services with the highest load on the NAS to verify performance,” says Mizoguchi. The company also evaluated the stability when using SMB and NFS simultaneously. “Isilon offers tremendous performance, scalability, and stability, and Azure NetApp Files rivaled it. We looked at other cloud services that could use Isilon, but picked Azure NetApp Files for its cost, performance, and stability advantages.”

The company decided to formally adopt Azure in March 2023 and implemented two more initiatives for even greater cost savings.

Taking inventory for massive space savings, using Azure Files for infrequently accessed files

The first of these initiatives was to reduce the amount of data to be migrated. The business units responsible for each service took a data inventory to calculate the volume and cost of migration.

“We had about 200 terabytes (TB) of files on premises,” says Fujimura. “When we started the proof of concept, we expected to have about 70 TB of files to migrate. By having our business units take an inventory, we cut that amount to 15 TB. It’s difficult to have a proper awareness of costs in an on-premises environment and we realized we were storing a lot of unnecessary data.”

The other money-saving measure was to use Azure Files alongside Azure NetApp Files. Fujifilm Software stores archived data and other infrequently accessed items on Azure Files, which has lower performance settings and costs. At the time of migration, the company stored around 10 TB of files on Azure NetApp Files and 5 TB of files stored in Azure Files.

“We used robocopy on Windows Server for file migration,” says Toshihiro Iwamoto of the Fujifilm Software Development Division. First, the company copied all files in every folder, then continued with differential backups, implementing the switchover on weeknights in May 2023. “We combined multi-threading and bandwidth control to increase copy speed without impacting normal business operations,” says Iwamoto. “Being able to use conventional tools and methods allowed us to migrate files with confidence.”

Moving file storage to Azure is also providing operational benefits. According to Fujimura, “For our on-premises system, we used Nagios and dedicated scale-out NAS management tools to monitor storage. But now we can centrally manage Azure NetApp Files and Azure Files with Microsoft Azure Monitor, just like our previously migrated virtual servers. We no longer need to use multiple tools.”

So, what are the cost benefits of the new configuration? For Fujifilm Software, the TCO for Azure NetApp Files and Azure Files is 55% lower than its old on-premises scale-out NAS over five years.

“We’ve completed the second phase of system cloudification and achieved our goal of converting to off-premises IT,” says Mizoguchi. Going forward, Mizoguchi would like to shift (modernize) applications running on migrated virtual machines to maximize the benefits of the cloud.

“We’ll migrate data from file services to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage as we continue modernizing, but this will be difficult for some aspects of our current applications. Until we find a solution, we’ll keep using the combination of Azure NetApp Files and Azure Files.