Why SoftNAS Enterprise for AWS?

Focus on the business at hand and concentrate on your customers and business instead of IT infrastructure. SoftNAS Enterprise Cloud NAS for AWS provides the performance, reliability, and fault tolerance required for mission-critical applications.

SoftNAS Cloud NAS for Amazon Web Services

SoftNAS Enterprise edition is a software-defined, full-featured enterprise cloud NAS filer for primary data using either block, object, or both types of storage. SoftNAS Enterprise enables existing applications to securely migrate to the cloud without re-engineering and with dedicated and predictably high performance.

With enterprise-class NAS features like: high-availability, in-line deduplication, compression, thin-provisioning, snapshots and rollbacks, replication, cloning, encryption (at-rest and in-transit), LDAP and Active Directory integration, and support for NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI or AFP storage protocols, SoftNAS Enterprise protects mission-critical and primary, active/hot data.

 

SoftNAS Enterprise offers the broadest range of storage options in terms of price vs. performance and backend storage selection, on-demand at a petabyte-scale across the AWS and Azure Marketplaces or on-premises.
  • Simply Powerful—A powerful, full-featured NAS filer.
  • Non-Stop Storage—Delivers 100% availability on AWS.
  • Frictionless Experience—Easy to try, buy and use.

 

  • Agile Storage Software—On-demand, where and when you need it.
  • Security on AWS—Secure storage software on AWS.
  • Performance & Capacity—Flexible pricing and enterprise-class data protection.

Simply Powerful

With a powerful and complete feature set, SoftNAS Enterprise protects mission-critical data in the cloud to ensure your business and applications are safe from downtime and data loss.

Unlimited Storage: Unified SAN & NAS Simultaneously enables storage of NFS, CIFS/SMB file sharing, block-based iSCSI I/O, and Apple File Protocol (AFP).

SnapClone™: Create instant read/write snapshot clones of production data that do not occupy appreciable disk space.

Unified SAN & NAS: Enables storage of NFS and CIFS file sharing and iSCSI block-based I/O.

Scheduled Snapshots: Meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). With SnapReplicate™, manual and scheduled snapshots provide low overhead recovery points, writable clones enable efficient recovery from data deletion or corruption events, without restoring backups.

SnapReplicate™: Replicate data anywhere you need it with efficient block replication.

Non-Stop Storage

SoftNAS Enterprise delivers 100% availability on AWS for non-stop application operation with automatic failover and seamless transfer across AWS availability zones.

SNAP HA®: Easy high-availability and cluster configuration for non-stop application operation with automatic failover and seamless transfer across controllers within 30 seconds or less.

Bumpless HA Failovers: Seamless failover across zones, providing uninterrupted CIFS and NFS client access to shared storage.

Multi-tenant HA Reliability: Detection, filtering, and prevention of sporadic HA failovers from noisy neighbors, zone stresses, and sporadic network anomalies occurring infrequently within heavily loaded multi-tenant AWS zones.

Storage Pool Backup/Restore: Storage pool backup with EBS snapshots – without scripting.

Automatic Drive Sparing: Automatically rebuilds a failed drive from a pre-allocated spare drive.

Async Replication: Asynchronous replication with bandwidth throttling to backup and transfer data –authenticated and encrypted– in near real-time from one controller to another.

Storage Gateway Cache for S3-Compatible Object Store: Experience local backup performance speed, regardless of Internet connectivity latency.

Frictionless Experience

SoftNAS Enterprise is quick and easy to configure in minutes for IT administrators and DevOps personnel with no specialized storage training required.

Simple Admin Interface: The StorageCenter™ GUI simplifies storage configuration and administration. The GUI is designed to allow IT professionals—ranging from virtualization engineers, system administrators, and even software developers—to use SoftNAS with ease.

No Storage Training Required: Implementing and running SoftNAS does not require advanced. SoftNAS Enterprise is intuitive for an IT person and requires no specialized storage training.

Wizards: SoftNAS Enterprise includes easy step-by-step wizards for initial configuration, high-availability (HA) setup, and SnapReplicate to manage snapshots.

Console or Command-Line: However, for the IT professionals who prefer it or who need to automate certain tasks, SoftNAS Enterprise includes command line options as well.

API & CLI: REST API and Command Line interface to automate SoftNAS Enterprise administration without the GUI Interface.

Dashboard: Monitors disk space, CPU, memory, and other resources in one convenient dashboard, including email alerts and notifications. The SoftNAS StorageCenter™ provides complete storage management and administration and is accessible from any mobile device.

Systems Management: SoftNAS Enterprise is compatible with most systems management tools that support SNMP.

Active Directory Integration Wizard: Configures active directory in 7 mouse clicks, providing simple, easy configuration and integration with Active Directory for granular access control using Windows ACLs

Flexible Pricing Model: Dynamically spin storage use up or down as needed or cover steady-state production workloads. SoftNAS Enterprise for AWS offers hourly on-demand or annual pricing.

Easy NFS Configuration: Configure NFS on AWS quickly and easily. The NFS UI Module simplifies NFS configuration and set up.

Agile Storage Software

SoftNAS Enterprise is launched with just a few mouse clicks in the AWS console or AWS Marketplace. It’s so easy to configure, you will have basic storage up and running in just minutes.

Software: SoftNAS Enterprise is instantly downloadable, quick, and easy to implement, uses your existing hardware and software, and IT resources.

Private/Public/Hybrid: SoftNAS Enterprise allows both on-premise and hosted data storage to combine the simplicity and instant accessibility of local storage with the peace-of-mind and infallible protection of off-site storage for disaster recovery and business continuity. Securely replicate data across any platform, data center, or cloud.

CloudFormation Templates: Automate your cloud experience. CloudFormation templates allow rapid deployment for Development and QA DevOps teams through automated storage server deployment via AWS.

Networking: SoftNAS Enterprise supports a broad range of networking configurations, including 1GB Ethernet and 10GB Ethernet, including HVM instances with SRV-IO to ensure data is transmitted at the highest possible speeds.

Security in the AWS Cloud

SoftNAS Enterprise builds upon Pure AWS storage infrastructures like EBS, S3, and SSD running within your own AWS account. Your data is always secure and totally under your control within your AWS virtual private cloud (VPC), never leaving the trusted AWS data center. Your data can also be fully encrypted and secured using AWS encryption of EBS and SoftNAS Enterprise encryption of S3 data.

Secure VPC Networking: Secure NAS storage access routing within VPCs with complex routing tables and subnets.

HA for Private VPCs: Private IPs for better VPC security in HA configurations.

360-degree Encryption™: Data encryption all the time–at rest and in flight. Data-at-rest is encrypted through open-source Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKs). LUKs is accepted as the standard for encryption of stored data. Data-in-flight is encrypted for CIFS and NFS file protocols.

Dual Factor Authentication: Prevent unauthorized access to SoftNAS management console with two-step authentication for SoftNAS StorageCenter through Google Authenticator.

Login Protection from Bots: Human verification through Google reCAPTCHA prevents bots from programmatically gaining access to the SoftNAS Enterprise management console.

Large-scale Windows Filer with Active Directory: Supports thousands of concurrent users with billions of files for enterprise-scale file server, VDI user file storage via CIFS/SMB 3 protocol.

Large-scale NFS Server: Supports thousands of concurrent users with billions of files for enterprise-scale file server, user file storage via NFS 4 protocol.

Identity & Access Management (IAM): Provide least privilege access control and management without use of access keys for HA setup and S3 cloud disks.

Performance and Capacity

SoftNAS Enterprise overcomes the limits imposed by basic AWS storage. Now you can access up to 154 terabytes (TB) of elastic block storage (up to 154 x 1 TB EBS volumes) from a single EC2 instance and share as NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI storage. Get up to 16 petabytes (PB) of S3-backed cloud disk storage for archival, backup and other mass storage uses.

RAID Arrays: RAID arrays allow the balanced storage of redundant data to increase fault tolerance and boost performance via data striping. You can choose any RAID level you need.

Caching: SoftNAS supports as much RAM and SSD caching available on your EC2 instances to significantly increase read/write performance and minimize latency.

Deduplication: Managing duplicate copies of redundant data is a waste of time and storage space. SoftNAS’ inline deduplication analyzes and compares previously stored data patterns to new data patterns to eliminate redundancy and save up to 50% or more of disk space.

Compression: By compressing data, SoftNAS can save between 20%-60% of disk space, increase read/write speeds, and allow for greater data caching efficiency to improve performance and increase storage density, which helps contain storage growth costs.

Scalable: With block replication, SoftNAS Enterprise scales to handle hundreds of millions to billions of files and directories. Scale up to 400 TB of EBS and 16 PB of S3 highly durable storage.

Cross-zone Capability: SoftNAS Enterprise offers shared data access across AWS availability zones using NFS, CIFS and iSCSI protocols to overcome direct attached storage limitations.

Higher EBS Capacity: Overcome 1 TB EBS capacity limits. Access to up to 400 TB of EBS from a single EC2 instance as shared storage.

Try SoftNAS Cloud NAS on Amazon Web Services