BuurstTM SoftNAS® Performance
Cloud storage performance overview
Users demand performance from LOB applications no matter where they live. On-premises application performance was not a problem, but cloud architects continually balance performance with cost.
Typically to increase performance for web applications engineers have increased the compute power of the application server however the largest bottleneck of cloud applications is access to the storage.
How SoftNAS increases web application performance
SoftNAS is a cloud NAS that has direct connectivity to cloud storage and provides a private connection to resources owned by your organization. Four main levers to change the performance to cloud storage.
Use a dedicated data plane
Dedicated data plane. SoftNAS improves performance by having dedicated storage attached to the NAS and a dedicated connection to the client, coupled with dedicated cache and CPU to move data fast.
Managed storage shares the data plane with thousands of customers. Performance is inconsistent and throttled to detract noisy neighbors.
SoftNAS provides a direct connection to storage for your resources only. Performance is predictable to the amount of traffic under your control.
Increase cloud NAS compute
SoftNAS has the ability to change the CPU, RAM, and Network speed of the cloud NAS instance. AWS and Azure virtual machines come with a wide variety of computing configurations. The more compute resources you allocate to your SoftNAS NAS, the greater access you have to cache, Throughput, and IOPS.
| SoftNAS Compute examples |
| M4.xlarge: 4 vCPU, 16 RAM, High Network |
| M5.2xlarge: 8 vCPU, 32 RAM, Up to 10 Gbps Network |
| C5.9xlarge: 36 VCPU, 72 RAM, 10 Gbps Network |
Utilize L1 and L2 cache
SoftNAS utilize L1 and L2 cache. SoftNAS automatically uses ½ of VM RAM as an L1 cache. You can also configure SoftNAS to use NMVE or SSD disk per storage pool for additional cache performance.
Use default client protocols
SoftNAS can use multiple protocols for a single volume. The default protocol for Linux is NFS, Windows default protocol is CIFS, and both operating systems can access storage through iSCSI. Although Windows can connect to storage with NFS, it is best to use default protocols, as Windows NFS is notoriously slow. With workloads such as SQL, iSCSI would be the preferred protocol for database storage.