Buurst SoftNAS No Downtime Guarantee

Introduction

The Buurst SoftNAS SNAP HA™ No Downtime Guarantee Program, guarantees continuous uptime for SoftNAS Cloud software and storage services when operated with production workloads under Buurst technical requirements and best practices, or we will credit one-calendar month of SNAP HA™ service fees during a 12-month period.

By implementing SNAP HA™ in a high availability configuration, you will realize continuous uptime of your storage infrastructure.

Program Summary:

Who Qualifies? 

New or existing Buurst customers running production applications or workloads on Buurst supported third party platforms who have also registered the product and holds a current Certificate of Validation.

How do you qualify?

  1. Deploy SoftNAS Cloud and successfully run SNAP HA™ High Availability storage following guidelines in the Buurst High Availability Guide and Best Practices and the Technical Requirements described below. Then, register the product from the product registration form, accessible from StorageCenter™.
  2. Subscribe to Buurst’s technical update communications.
  3. Obtain a Certificate of Validation from a designated Buurst software support engineer confirming that number 1 above has been completed. This Certificate of
    Validation is valid for a 12-month period and must be renewed annually unless a Recertification Event requires a re-evaluation of compliance with the then applicable Buurst High Availability Guide and Best Practice and the Technical Requirements.  Certificate of Validation renewal is at no-charge to you.

If a Recertification Event occurs, the then current Certificate of Validation will continue to be effective for a period of thirty (30) days after the occurrence of such Recertification Event unless Buurst, in its sole discretion and upon request, grants an extension to allow compliance with the then applicable Buurst High Availability Guide and Best Practices and the Technical Requirements taking into account commercial reasonable efforts to achieve compliance and certification.  Any extension must be granted in writing by the designated Buurst software support engineer who initially issued the Certificate of Validation or such engineer’s replacement.

What is a Recertification Event?

 A Recertification Event occurs when:

  1.  Buurst updates the Buurst High Availability Guide and Best Practices. Buurst will release any update in accordance with its standard and customary practice; or
  2. Upon the expiration date set forth on the Certificate of Validation.

What is guaranteed?

NFS, CIFS/SMB or iSCSI storage connectivity will be available and operational at a high level of availability.  This guarantee applies if:

  • storage connectivity outage is due to a Buurst software failure of any SoftNAS Cloud controller; or
  • storage connectivity outage is due to a failure of SNAP HA™ to maintain NFS, CIFS/SMB and/or iSCSI access from any controller.Downtime commences one-minute after SNAP HA™ determines that a failover is required and ceases when the failover is completed.

How do you file a claim?

Open a support ticket by emailing support@buurst.com, complete the required outage information, and provide remote access into the controllers of the failed system.  The support ticket must be submitted within 10 days after the end of the month in which the claimed outage or failure occurred and must be accompanied by a copy of a current Certificate of Validation.  Buurst personnel must be provided with all requested log files and reasonable access to inspect the failed SNAP HA™ instances before a claim will be processed.  Approval of the credit is at the discretion of Buurst, dependent upon the results of the check and inspection performed by Buurst. Third-party reports, data or log files may not be used for determination. Upon Buurst’s verification of the outage due solely to SNAP HA™ operational failure, such outage is beyond the Buurst SoftNAS SNAP HA™ No Downtime Guarantee Program, and submission of a current Certificate of Validation, Buurst will issue a credit within 30 days of such determination.

How much is the credit and how is it applied?

The credit is equal to the monthly payment for the applicable instances of SNAP HA™ that are the subject of the credit for the month in which the failure or outage occurred.  If quarterly, semi-annual or annual payments are made, then such payment will be prorated on a monthly basis to determine the credit amount.  A single credit is available during a 12-month period for each subscription of SNAP HA™.

Credits are applied towards future payments owed to Buurst only and are not issued as refunds.

Technical Requirements

SoftNAS Cloud and SNAP HA™ deployments must meet these configuration requirements:

  • Satisfy all configuration requirements and best practices in the Buurst High Availability Guide and Best Practices, which can be found at https://docs.softnas.com/display/SD/High+Availability and may be updated from time to time, and obtain a Certificate of Validation. Buurst will release any update in accordance with its standard and customary practice.
  • Software version must be up to date with the latest version according to our Release Notes.
  • Software updates must be applied within 60 days of availability.
  • If you require additional time in order to upgrade, you need to contact Buurst Support and request an extension.

Exclusions

The following are excluded from the guarantee’s coverage:

  • Recovery Point Objectives are outside of scope. Due to a myriad of WAN speed options and fluctuations, the data snapshot time represented in the secondary instance of the SNAP HA™ pair is not covered by this guarantee.
  • Unavailability, inoperability or inaccessibility of the backup server instance affecting SNAP HA™, whether such unavailability, inoperability or inaccessibility is the result of electrical failures, hardware failures or other causes not within Buurst’s control.
  • Outages due to your operation of SoftNAS Cloud not meeting the Buurst High Availability Guide and Best Practices.
  • Storage connectivity outage not due solely to a failure of SNAP HA™.
  • Non-production instances used for development or testing are not covered.
  • Outages due to power failures and scheduled downtime for server maintenance are not regarded as downtime for purposes of relevance for this guarantee, nor is downtime caused by unavoidable acts of God or other conditions beyond Buurst’s control, nor by third-party digital or physical attacks on servers and data centers, such as direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks, or other forms of hacking.
  • Inoperability, unavailability or inaccessibility of virtual environments, machines or servers operated by you or third parties on which the SNAP HA™ High Availability is operating.
  • Interruptions in service or functionality caused by you from custom scripting or coding or the installation, update or reconfiguration of third-party applications (such as encryption and security applications) are likewise not eligible to be counted against downtime.

 

Updated December 2023