SoftNAS Improves Cloud Storage Price/Performance Barriers and Fulfills Its Cloud Fabric Vision and Mission

SoftNAS®, a cloud data platform company with a deep history of transforming on-premises, costly NAS storage hardware into dedicated, private NAS virtual software that runs on public cloud services, today announced general availability of SoftNAS version on Microsoft Azure. It delivers cloud storage cost savings by leveraging highly-durable, low-cost cloud object storage. SoftNAS cuts the time and complexities of cloud data migration projects by up to 90%, turning months into weeks and simplifying live data migrations to the cloud. It enables customers to connect any kind of data to the cloud anywhere in the world.

“The addition of SoftNAS new version and SoftNAS Platinum to the Azure Marketplace will simplify customer data management and control in the Azure cloud.”

SoftNAS accelerates high-speed global data transfers up to 20 times faster with its patented SoftNAS® UltraFast™ technology, enabling Azure customers to connect remote offices, branch offices, factories and Internet of Things (IoT) at the edge with the cloud.

New features of SoftNAS 4 address the impediments that block real-world cloud adoption, revolving around common cloud storage uses cases: primary and secondary cloud file storage, workload and application cloud migration, hybrid cloud and synthetic cloud backups in partnership with Veeam. SoftNAS conducted expansive customer interviews and identified 18 discrete cloud adoption barriers that SoftNAS 4 solve.

“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, Senior Analyst for The Taneja Group.

“Today we are delivering on our company mission and the vision to become the fabric for business data in the cloud. After three years of relentless company focus, strategic input from our cloud platform partners and customers, we have produced what I believe is the gold standard in cloud data control and management software,” said Rick Braddy, CEO, CTO and Founder of SoftNAS.

“When I founded SoftNAS six years ago as a disgruntled traditional storage customer, my goals were to reduce the high costs of storage, make it easier to connect applications with the cloud and keep IT in control of its destiny in the cloud. SoftNAS 4 is the realization of those goals, and I invite customers and partners to start benefiting from it today,” Braddy said.

“We are pleased that SoftNAS has debuted even more features that help customers address critical cloud adoption pain points,” said Jurgen Willis, senior director, Azure Storage at Microsoft Corp. “The addition of SoftNAS 4 and SoftNAS Platinum to the Azure Marketplace will simplify customer data management and control in the Azure cloud.”

SoftNAS features include:

• SoftNAS® UltraFast™ is the SoftNAS patented technology that 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.SoftNAS UltraFast accelerates transfers of data into, out of and across private, public, hybrid clouds and multi-clouds. SoftNAS UltraFast overcomes up to 4,000 milliseconds of latency and up to 10% packet loss due to network congestion, connecting remote locations with the cloud over any kind of network conditions.

• SoftNAS® Lift and Shift™ with continuous sync enables 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. Automatic restart and suspend/resume ensures bulk data transfer jobs run reliably while bandwidth schedules enable customers to open or throttle network usage. SoftNAS Lift and Shift works with SoftNAS UltraFast, so migrations can take place over any kind of network anywhere in the world.
• SoftNAS® FlexFiles integrates and transforms 24 types of data by leveraging Apache NiFi and a set of pre-built data integration processors. With SoftNAS FlexFiles, customers can 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 FlexFiles makes connecting a customer’s business with the cloud and SaaS services easy to integrate through a drag and drop interface with no programming required. SoftNAS FlexFiles also leverages SoftNAS UltraFast, enabling customers to leverage FlexFiles and Apache NiFi over any network conditions.

• SoftNAS® ObjFast™ makes cloud object storage like Azure Blob storage run at near-block-level performance while still taking advantage of object storage pricing, which results in up to 67% cost savings vs. block storage alone.SoftNAS ObjFast throttles data transfer to cloud object storage so it’s as fast as possible without exceeding Azure object storage read/write capabilities.SoftNAS ObjFast’s patent pending acceleration technology 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 Azure public cloud.

• SoftNAS® SmartTiers™ is a patent pending automated storage tiering feature that moves aging data from more expensive, high-performance Azure premium and disk block storage to less expensive Azure Blob object storage, according to customer-set policies, reducing public cloud storage costs by up to 67% and is now available for beta testing.

SoftNAS 4 is available in the Azure Marketplace along with the other SoftNAS products. As a result, customers can launch all SoftNAS products on-demand, directly from the Azure Marketplace and spin up cloud data solutions in just minutes with no prior purchasing approvals.

Control Any Data. Any Cloud. Anywhere.

Data is the DNA that makes every business unique and is one of the most valuable assets a modern, automated business owns today. The majority of data, IT applications, business automation workloads, IoT devices and SaaS applications will either be running in the cloud or connected and spread across multiple clouds. Businesses need to control any data, on any cloud from anywhere to quickly meet their needs. They demand a powerful, flexible solution to fully leverage their data DNA within the cloud that is not only fast and cost-effective, but that doesn’t require rewriting or re-engineering applications for the cloud.

SoftNAS®,  pioneered cloud data control and management with its SoftNAS data platform. The company began six years ago as the global leader in software-defined Cloud NAS and has matured into an enterprise software company. The SoftNAS cloud data platform provides customers a unified, integrated way to aggregate, transform, accelerate, protect and store data and to easily create hybrid cloud solutions that bridge islands of data across SaaS, legacy systems, remote offices, factories, IoT, analytics, AI and machine learning, web services, SQL, NoSQL and the cloud – any kind of data. SoftNAS works with the most popular public, private, hybrid and premises-based virtual cloud operating systems, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware vSphere.