SoftNAS^® on AWS: design & configuration guide.

Step 2:

Considerations and Reference Architecture

2.2:

For best performance results match workload to instance:

High Workload

M4.10xlarge or equivalent

Suited to heavier workloads that require very high-speed network connection due to the amount of data transferred over the connection. This level of VM also provides much more storage, CPU, and memory capacity

3.1

Select Your EBS Volume Type

Magnetic Backed

Magnetic-backed volume types support higher block sizes up to 1,024 KB. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) Amazon EBS volume types are based on magnetic storage technology. The Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volume type is designed for sequential read/write workloads (e.g., Big Data). It can achieve very high throughput (500 MB/s) for sequential read/write workloads (compared to 160 MB/s and 320 MB/s for SSD-backed gp2 and io1, respectively). Generally, Big Data workloads operate on very large sequential datasets and generate data for storage in a similar way. The st1 volume type has a baseline performance of 40 MB/s per terabyte (TB) of allocated storage and, like gp2, can burst beyond the baseline performance for a short period of time. The Cold HDD (sc1) volume type is designed for high density and infrequent access workloads.
This volume type is suitable for cold storage (infrequent access) applications where low cost is important. Unlike st1, the baseline performance of an sc1 volume is 12 MB/s per TB of allocated storage. It’s important to note that Amazon S3 achieves high availability (HA) by default within a single region, whereas sc1 volumes have to be mirrored across Availability Zones to achieve parity with Amazon S3 in durability and availability of the data (this doubles and triples the cost of sc1 when compared to Amazon S3.) Nevertheless, depending on certain access patterns (e.g., cold versus warm) of the data, the cost of sc1 volumes can be cheaper for certain workloads.

SSD Backed

General Purpose (gp2) and provisioned IOPS (io1) SSD volumes can achieve faster IOPS performance and very high throughput on random read/write workloads when compared to magnetic disks, but at a higher price point. However, gp2 and io1 volume types are limited to a throughput of approximately 320 MB/s (160 MB/s for gp2, 320 MB/s for io1).   General Purpose (gp2) volumes provide a fixed 1:3 ratio between gigabytes and IOPS provisioned, so a 100 GB General Purpose volume provides a baseline of 300 IOPS. Gp2 volumes less than 1 TB in size can also burst for short periods, up to 3,000 IOPS. You can provision General Purpose volumes up to 16 TB and 10,000 IOPS. Provisioned IOPS (io1) volumes are intended for workloads that demand consistent performance, such as databases. You can create provisioned IOPS volumes up to 16 TB and 20,000 IOPS.

Over a year, Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to deliver within 10 percent of the provisioned IOPS performance 99.9 percent of the time. There are differences in total throughput capabilities between Provisioned IOPS (io1) and General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes. Io1 volumes are designed to provide up to 320 MB/second of throughput while gp2 volumes are designed to provide up to 160 MB/second.

Reference Architecture with HA

Step 5:

Setup and configure AWS infrastructure

Configure AWS VPCs

If you’ve already set up your AWS environment, please skip to the next section (Configure AWS IAM Policy and Role). Amazon Web Services maintains multiple scenarios for creating VPCs with a step-by-step walkthrough

Configure AWS IAM Rules

Once you have your VPC created we need to define a SoftNAS Cloud NAS specific IAM policy and attach that policy to a specific role. Login to your AWS console and navigate to ‘Identity and Access Management.’ Now, follow the steps to create your policy and role here: Creating the IAM Role for SoftNAS Cloud NAS®. Please note, when creating the IAM Role, it is case sensitive and MUST be named “SoftNAS_DISK_IAM” (without the quotes).