SoftNAS Now Available on CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace

SoftNAS Now Available on CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace

by | Webinars

Today, SoftNAS announced SoftNAS for CenturyLink. This integration allows customers of the CenturyLink Cloud platform faster backup and archival, expanded platform support and the ability to extend storage investments and shared file storage for VMware VSAN.

The SoftNAS provides access for CenturyLink Cloud customers to a complete software-defined solution for on-premise, hybrid and public cloud storage to manage the costly expenses around backing up expansive data and the time required to archive older data. Local caching and S3 object storage connectivity make SoftNAS ideal for enterprises, SMBs and departments using on-premise storage and for service providers offering hybrid cloud services, such as backup and archival solutions.

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In addition to providing gateway capabilities, SoftNAS surpasses the singular gateway concept by combining three key components:

  • Access to on-premise and private cloud storage, including SAN, VSAN and S3-compatible object storage
  • Access to public cloud storage, including block and S3-compatible object storage
  • A unified shared file system with NAS filer features accessed via NFS and CIFS/SMB

To learn more about SoftNAS for CenturyLink Cloud, please click below:

Setting up SoftNAS on Century Link

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of EBS Backup to S3

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of EBS Backup to S3

by | AWS

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of EBS Backup to S3

Developing a comprehensive strategy for backing up and restoring data is not a simple task. In some industries, regulatory requirements for data security, privacy, and records retention can be important factors to consider when developing a backup strategy.

EBS Advantages

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) provides many features such as high durability and reliability, encryption, provisioned IOPS, and point-in-time snapshots—amongst others. The built-in volume snapshot feature is a good option for backing up data.

Like all things AWS, Amazon has many options for creating backups. If you setup your EC2 instance to use EBS, you can simply create a snapshot of your volume from the AWS Console. These EBS snapshots are incremental backups that persist on Amazon’s S3. Incremental means that only the blocks that have changed since your last snapshot are saved.

Problem

EBS snapshots are really slick, but manually creating snapshots from the AWS Console isn’t a good solution if your goal is to have daily, hourly, or snapshots on a customizable timeframe.

In order for any backup to be useful, the backed-up content has to be crash consistent.  This means that write IOs are quiesced and write caches flushed.  Enterprise backup software has solved that problem for years, but direct use of EBS Snapshots for backup does not.

Alternative

You can create your own services using scripts and command line tools. But to do this you need to have the knowledge and experience of writing shell scripts, scheduling and executing. The snippet of script below provides details about the server in the snapshot.

code snippet

With ease of use in mind, the next version of SoftNAS will include a number of features that will allow for a faster and more convienient backup and archival process.

Learn more about Buurst SoftNAS.