A new Xen vulnerability is forcing cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reboot a portion of its EC2 fleet over the week (the second such reboot in 6 months). Such periodic maintenance is necessary—expected even—to maintain the best possible security; however, some IT departments are still scrambling to ensure business continuity and prevent negative business impact.
Pre-emptively architecting cloud infrastructure to include a highly available storage configuration is a well-known best practice, but doing so can be difficult and time consuming for the IT generalist.
With SoftNAS’s built-in cross-zone high-availability, designing for failure can be fast and simple during the zone reboot preparations.
SoftNAS SNAP HA™ delivers a low-cost, low-complexity solution for high-availability storage clustering that is easy to deploy and manage.
A robust set of HA capabilities protects against data center, availability zone, server, network and storage subsystem failures to keep businesses running without downtime.
SNAP HA for (AWS) includes patent-pending Elastic HA™ technology, providing NAS clients in any availability zone uninterrupted HA access to the storage cluster across availability zones.
In the event of an outage, such as the zone reboot, when Zone A is reset, SNAP HA would automatically fail over to Zone B and become the primary node. The rebooted, former primary instance, becomes the secondary instance until either a manual takeover to restore initial state, or another point of failure, when it would failover back to Zone A, which would once again become the primary controller.
Some security conscious customers or those with extremely sensitive data do avoid solutions like Elastic HA, which utilizes public IPs, exposing storage to Internet accessible addresses.
With these customers in mind, the next version of SoftNAS will include a number of features that will allow for greater deployment flexibility and security.
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