Amazon EBS has been the default block storage for EC2 for over a decade, but it's a disk management strategy, not a data management strategy. Attaching an EBS volume means you handle performance, sizing, and lifecycle manually. For high-performance databases or SAN-style workloads, this creates significant operational overhead.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN) offers a fabric approach. An iSCSI LUN is instantly available across a cluster, shifting focus from disks to a namespace. This is critical for Windows Failover Clusters, SQL Server, or VMware Cloud on AWS, where EBS's pinned-resource model limits sharing.

EBS can't match FSxN's capabilities: block-level tiering moves cold data to S3-priced storage, global deduplication eliminates redundancy across volumes, and FlexClone creates writable copies in seconds. While EBS is simpler to start, FSxN's blended cost per GB is often 50-70% lower for high-IOPS setups, making it better for scaling enterprise workloads.