General availability of SoftNAS version 4 was announced by Houston-based SoftNAS. Available in three product editions that run on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and VMware vSphere, the company claims that SoftNAS 4 “accelerates high-speed global data transfers up to 20 times faster with its patented SoftNAS UltraFast technology, enabling customers to connect remote offices, branch offices, factories and Internet of Things (IoT) at the edge with the cloud.”
New features of SoftNAS 4 include SoftNAS UltraFast, SoftNAS Lift and Shift, SoftNAS FlexFiles, SoftNAS ObjFast and SoftNAS SmartTiers.
According to the announcement, the SoftNAS patented UltraFast technology “saves on time and costs by accelerating global bulk data movement up to 20 times faster than standard TCP/IP protocols at one-tenth the cost of alternative bulk data transfer solutions.”
The SoftNAS Lift and Shift feature will provide live migration of production data and workloads and “keeps content up-to-date when moving data to the cloud, between datacenters and/or distributing it to remote locations.”
SoftNAS FlexFiles leverages Apache NiFi and other pre-built data integration processors in order to integrate and transform 24 different types of data. According to the press release, customers will be able to “tackle massively complex data integration projects combining file systems, Hadoop, Redshift, HTTP(S), Web Services, SQL/noSQL, XML, S3/Blob Objects and Custom Data Integrations.”
SoftNAS ObjFast is a patent-pending acceleration technology that has been “optimized, tested and certified for Veeam Synthetic Full Backups, so Veeam cloud backup, copy jobs and recovery runs at near-block-level performance with the public cloud.”
SoftNAS SmartTiers uses customer-set policies to move aging data from more expensive block storage to less expensive object storage, which the company claims can “[reduce] public cloud storage costs by up to 67 percent and is now available for beta testing.”
“Based upon our multi-cloud research we uncovered a number of challenges customers are struggling with to take advantage of public cloud infrastructure. SoftNAS 4 addresses many of the customer data management and control challenges head on with its unique combination of cloud NAS, bulk data transfer acceleration and data integration capabilities. SoftNAS is delivering a robust cloud data fabric companies can use as a strategy to more quickly adopt the cloud and save time and money in the process,” said Jeff Kato, a senior analyst for The Taneja Group, in a prepared statement.
With SoftNAS 4 released to general availability, customers will be able to “launch all SoftNAS products on-demand, directly from the AWS and Azure Marketplaces to spin up cloud data solutions in just minutes with no prior purchasing approvals,” according to the announcement.
About the Author
Wendy Hernandez is group managing editor for the 1105 Enterprise Computing Group.
