New Maintenance Release 4.4.4 Improves Performance with a No Downtime Guarantee

Buurst Staff

SoftNAS is now Buurst! Our new name represents our commitment to even higher performance and reliability for your cloud applications and storage. The new Maintenance Release 4.4.4 is our latest step in that commitment. This version is a must-update for NDG compliance. 

Here are the highlights… 

  • Replication Performance Improvements now switched to ZSTD compression.
  • Lift and Shift Improved File Scan Performance– now much faster.
  • SmartTiers Fixes for migration policies, storage expansion and UI.
  • SnapReplicateand Snap HA Fixes for Snapshot retention, Snap replication and UI display issues. 
  • Updated ZFS to v0.8.3-3
  • Bug Fixes & Security Updates

Version 4.4.4 for Buurst SoftNAS® is generally available.

Version 4.4.4 for Buurst SoftNAS® is generally available. As a current subscriber, you will continue to have access to previous versions of SoftNAS products. However, Buurst highly recommends updating to version 4.4.4 as soon as possible to ensure you have the updated ZFS versionsecurity fixes, and dramatic performance enhancements.  

 Version 4.4.4 establishes a new minimum version requirement for the Buurst® No Storage Downtime Guarantee™. Please update your instance(s) within 30 days to ensure you remain in compliance with the Buurst No Storage Downtime Guarantee.  

Read “HOW TO UPGRADE” below for instructions on how to begin your upgrade process. 

NEW IN VERSION 4.4.4 

Replication Performance Improvements Buurst SoftNAS has switched to ZSTD compression for replication transfers for a performance improvement gain of up to 40% through faster data replication. More info on ZSTD can be found here: https://facebook.github.io/zstd/ 

Lift and Shift Improved File Scan Performance – Scans of Lift and Shift source locations with a high number of file system objects are now much quicker. In lab testing, a source with 1 TiB of data and 1.5 million objects was cut from 92 hours to 4 hours, using 1 GbE networking. 

ENHANCED IN VERSION 4.4.4

Updated ZFS to v0.8.3-3 – This ZFS upgrade addresses a potential ZFS panic issue with send/receive VERIFY3 operations.

Lift and Shift Pool Creation – The pool creation process has now been optimized to provide better feedback if invalid parameters are provided. 

SmartTiers enhancements – Several fixes to the SmartTiers feature have been implemented:

  • Resolved an issue in which migration policy settings were not retained after a reboot.
  • Resolved an issue in which expansion of SmartTiers storage could potentially result in data corruption.
  • Resolved issues related to data consistency during SmartTiers migration of data between tiers.
  • SmartTiers UI now displays consistent usage status.

SnapReplicate and SNAP HA – Several fixes to the SnapReplicate and SNAP HA features have been implemented:

  • Unsupported SNAP HA recovery options within the UI for the VMware version are no longer visible to the user.  
  • Previously, the snapshot weekly retention policy defaulted to zero. The default has been changed to 1 to ensure that snapshots are retained at least one week unless otherwise specified. 
  • Resolved an issue in which a mismatch between the mbuffer block size and the SnapRep block size could result in memory fragmentation that impacts performance.

SECURITY FIXES IN 4.4.4

  • CVE-2018-17192: Missing X-Frame : Indicates to a browser whether a page can be rendered into a frame or other type of embedded object
  • CVE-2018-12302: Missing http only attribute
  • CVE-2018-17192: Clickjacking: X-Frame-Options header missing
  • CVE-2019-19089: Missing X-Content-Type-Options
  • CVE-2016-6884, CVE-2013-0169: TLS v1.1
  • CVE-2013-2566, CVE-2015-280, CVE-2015-4000, CVE-2013-2566: Weak Ciphers

***Read the Buurst SoftNAS Release Notes for the full list of enhancements in version 4.4.4 and more detailed instructions on how to upgrade versions.

HOW TO UPGRADE

Read the Release Notes for specific instructions on how to update from your specific SoftNAS Cloud version number.

NOTE: Your in-place upgrade can take up to an hour to complete if upgrading from version 3.4.9.4 or previous. If updating from more recent versions, the upgrade could still take up to 45 minutes for operating system updates. Do NOT terminate the upgrade while in progress because errors will occur. If you feel that your upgrade is taking longer than expected, please contact Buurst Support for assistance, and do NOT reboot your instance.

ARE YOU REGISTERED FOR GOLD SUPPORT?

All customers can submit a support ticket by emailing support@buurst.com.

AWS Marketplace subscribers of Buurst® SoftNAS running the 800 performance band or higher [min. Throughput MBps (128k) up to 265 on AWS] are entitled to 24x7x365 Buurst Gold-level phone support. Contact Buurst to register and receive your free Gold-level support.

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