Got the Public Cloud Storage Summertime Blues? I’ve Got the Cure.

Got the Public Cloud Storage Summertime Blues? I’ve Got the Cure.

SoftNAS SmartTiers Cost Savings Calculator is able to show you how much you can potentially save on storage costs from public cloud vendors.

We’ve heard the many benefits of moving to the public cloud including:

  • How scalable it is.
  • How fast it is to set up and tear down an environment.
  • The unlimited and bottomless storage availability.
  • The increased levels of security.

The ease in which testing can be accomplished and of course how inexpensive it is. Sounds a lot like a salesperson promising you the world with all upside and no downside, doesn’t it? Well, much of the hype about the public cloud is true, for the most part. “Wait” you say, “how can this be true?” Public cloud storage can be pricey and adds up quickly if you have any data-hungry applications running in the cloud. Not only can this create the Summertime blues; but the blues for every season as well.

Friends (if I may call you that), I got the cure for what ails you. What if I told you that I have a way for you to save up to two-thirds of your public cloud storage costs – would you believe me? Heck, you don’t know me, maybe I’m one of those aforementioned salespeople promising you the world. Well I’m not and I can even prove that I can save you money on your public cloud storage costs and the best part, you will even prove it to yourself with your own information and no “sleight of hand” on my part.

SoftNAS®, announced and made available its SoftNAS® 4 release that contains a powerful, patent-pending feature called SoftNAS® SmartTiers™. This feature (currently available for beta testing) offers automated storage tiering functionality that moves aging data from more expensive, high-performance block storage to less expensive object storage, according to customer-set policies (up to 4 storage tiers), reducing public cloud storage costs by up to 67%, without sacrificing application performance.

SoftNAS SmartTiers

“That’s great” you say; “but, how can I prove it to myself?” Well that’s what I’m so excited about telling you, because you can prove it to yourself using your own data.

SoftNAS has just released the SoftNAS SmartTiers Cost Savings Calculator on its corporate website. The calculator is able to show you how much you can potentially save on storage costs from public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) and Microsoft® Azure™ by using the automated storage tiering feature of SoftNAS® 4 called: SoftNAS SmartTiers.

The SmartTiers Cost Savings Calculator provides you with a simple, clean interface for entering in a few key data points and then dynamically presenting in graphical form what the cost for public cloud storage would be both with and without using SoftNAS SmartTiers, including the potential savings that you could achieve with SoftNAS SmartTiers. After filling out the simple and quick registration form, you will also receive a detailed email report. The multi-page detailed report breaks down the potential costs and savings over a three-year period.

SoftNAS® SmartTiers™ Storage Cost Savings Calculator

So, my friends, do you still have the public cloud storage Summertime blues, or have I cured them for you? Please try out the new SoftNAS SmartTiers Cost Savings Calculator and let us know your thoughts. Thank you.

About the Author:

John Bedrick, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Buurst

Bringing more than four decades of technology experience to SoftNAS, John is responsible for all product marketing functions including pricing, content development, competitive, industry and market analysis. John has held leadership roles with: Microsoft, Intel, Seagate, CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, National Semiconductor, and several startup companies. John began his career in technology in IT management with Time-Warner and Philip Morris, where he was responsible for introducing personal computing devices and networking to both mainframe centric companies. He has helped numerous companies increase their bottom line revenue by over USD $1 billion. John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics and Marketing from Wagner college and joint master’s and doctorate degrees in Metaphysics from ULC, as well as, an advanced certificate in international business from Harvard Business School. John is an internationally recognized subject matter expert in the areas of: security, data privacy and storage. He is an accomplished speaker and has been featured in numerous international venues.

New: SoftNAS Platinum Features Beta

SoftNAS Platinum

 

SoftNAS® Platinum is an integrated hybrid cloud data product, combining a software-defined, enterprise-class NAS virtual storage appliance; high-speed data transfer up to up to 20 times faster accelerating data migrations, backups and data movement; and data integration/replication for IT to manage and control data centrally. Customers save time and money while increasing efficiency.

IT struggles with the ever increasing amounts of data that businesses generate at an exponentially increasing pace from many different sources – including IoT. Through the SoftNAS Platinum product architecture, SoftNAS addresses the impracticalities that plague real world broader cloud adoption, so IT can control its data destiny.

 

Learn More About the SoftNAS Platinum Beta Features

 

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New: SoftNAS Essentials

SoftNAS Essentials

 

SoftNAS® Essentials provides files services for object storage, lowering the overall storage cost of secondary data for cloud backup, disaster recovery and archive image storage. With SoftNAS patent-pending ObjFast™ technology, SoftNAS Essentials accelerates I/O performance to object storage backends up to 400% faster than before. SoftNAS Essentials leverages the cost-effectiveness and scalability of cloud object storage as a datastore while presenting applications with standard NAS and SAN protocols—on-premises, public cloud, or hybrid cloud—without modifying existing applications.

 

Learn More About SoftNAS Essentials

 

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New: Azure Blob Object Storage

New: Azure Blob Object Storage

Learn how SoftNAS Cloud uses Azure Cool Blob Storage, Hot Blob Storage, Standard Disks and Premium Disks — allowing customers to tune performance, cost, capacity and protection for different file systems and use cases. SoftNAS Cloud performance scales with the instance and storage types you choose. SoftNAS Cloud supports NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI and Apple File Protocol (AFP) file protocols.

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Using SoftNAS to frontend Azure Blob Storage has a number of advantages including:

  • Highly Scalable: Customers can scale cloud NAS deployment from gigabytes to petabytes, supporting up to 16PB.
  • No Application Re-coding: SoftNAS allows easy workload migrations to the Azure cloud without changing existing application code, data structures or workflows.
  • Improved Flexibility: Customers can create SoftNAS volumes using the Blob Storage tiers with the right mix of price and performance that best meets their needs.

With support for Azure Blob Storage, customers can choose Hot and Cool Storage tiers for Blob storage with:

  • Azure Hot Blob Storage – Object storage optimized for frequent I/O data.
  • Azure Cool Blob Storage – Object storage optimized for low I/O and low cost (safe-keeping of less frequently accessed file data).
  • Premium Disk Storage – SSD based block storage for high-performance, I/O intensive workloads.
  • Standard Disk Storage – HDD based block storage for general purpose workloads.

Try SoftNAS Free for 30 Days

SoftNAS 3.1 Released – Includes Shell Shock fixes

A software update for 3.0 customers (upgrade for earlier customers) is now available as SoftNAS 3.1, released today.

This release contains fixes for the much publicized Shell Shock bash shell vulnerability. The Shell Shock fix is an update to bash that can be applied on existing SoftNAS systems in several ways:

1. Apply the software update to a 3.0 system (not reboot required)
2. Apply a software upgrade to older 2.x systems (requires a reboot and maintenance window)
3. Simply apply only the Shell Shock fix as a “yum update bash” to any system.

Be sure to read and follow the release notes carefully as you choose which approach to take.

Release Notes: https://www.softnas.com/docs/softnas/v2/html/release_notes.html

From a practical standpoint, the Shell Shock exploit is not actually available to anonymous attackers of SoftNAS systems, because authentication is required by Apache before any access is allowed. Nevertheless, SoftNAS recommends the fixes be applied to all SoftNAS systems as soon as practical from an IT operations standpoint.

The 3.1 release contains additional fixes plus SoftNAS for Azure, Early Access Program (EAP) support, details of which will be available next week (stay tuned for more on that).

SoftNAS Launches 2.1 Upgrade with patent pending Elastic HA and SNAP HA technologies

SoftNAS, the #1 NAS in the Cloud, today launched the SoftNAS 2.1 upgrade for SoftNAS on AWS Marketplace and SoftNAS Professional™ on VMware® ESXi. 5 The upgrade delivers several unique features, including the first patent-pending Elastic HA™ and SNAP HA™ technology. On AWS, Elastic HA uses an enhanced elastic IP address to route NAS client requests (i.e., NFS mounts, Windows CIFS shares and iSCSI block I/O traffic) across a storage cluster of two SoftNAS filers, each with its own controller running within a separate AWS availability zone (AZ). Elastic HA enables non-stop routing of NAS client traffic to the proper SoftNAS controllers, which can be located within the same AZ or across AZ’s. Prior to the introduction of Elastic HA on AWS, it was not possible to create a dual controller configuration that could span AZ’s on AWS for business-critical storage applications and to deliver up to 99.999 percent reliability and seamless automatic failover. Get more details on Elastic HA for AWS. Elastic HA on VMware also utilizes an enhanced virtual IP address to deliver up to 99.999 percent reliability and seamless automatic failover within approximately 20 seconds. Get more details on Elastic HA for VMware SoftNAS supports high availability with its new SNAP HA add-on module, which allows easy HA cluster configuration in less than 2 minutes with just 3 mouse clicks. SNAP HA is the easiest, fastest way to create an HA storage cluster available today. With SNAP HA, premise-based customers running VMware can save up to 70 percent, using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) servers and SSDs, compared to traditional proprietary NAS appliances, while saving additional money on training for their IT professionals who already know VMware, which are leveraged as the storage platform. High availability and SNAP HA are not available for SoftNAS Essentials, a low-cost version ideal for high-density applications like video surveillance, film and video editing, and corporate A/V department needs, which necessitate lots of Serial ATA (SATA) storage without the more premium NAS features. Additionally, the 2.1 upgrade includes a cloud computing storage API and CLI, which makes SoftNAS easy to integrate with CloudFormation templates, auto-scaling groups, and other automation systems used by DevOps teams for agile cloud deployment on Amazon Web Services Marketplace. The upgrade also includes added support for NFSv4 Kerberos and LDAP Support, which enables multi-user security access rights to files and directories managed by the SoftNAS filer, and improved NFS and CIFS performance and throughput tuning for enhanced read and write caching to increase IOPS. SoftNAS 2.1 is the most robust, stable and cost effective storage platform available for the Amazon Web Services platform. SoftNAS is available on an hourly pricing basis. With the addition of CloudFormation templates, SoftNAS provides DevOps teams with a storage platform that’s production-ready, and which can be used to fully simulate production data for use in development and QA staging systems. SoftNAS Pro 2.1 is a more cost-effective alternative to high-priced, proprietary NAS appliances. Best of all, because it runs on VMware ESXi, IT staff already have the skills, and often the existing hardware, needed to deploy SoftNAS Pro. Simply add some SSD drives, SAS and/or SATA to an existing server and (optionally) an additional storage enclosure, and you have a full-featured, enterprise-grade NAS that delivers the same features at a fraction of the cost. Read the Release Notes Read the Press Releases Read the SoftNAS HA Guide