We are excited to announce that our newest version of SoftNAS, SoftNAS 5, is now publically available. In our latest update, we have made the following improvements:

• New version of Linux, Kernel, Samba​
• Up to 60% better performance​
• BYOL License performance level enforcement​
• Firewall port lock down​
• Azure OMS Support​

SoftNAS 5 Webinar/Demo

In this video, Adam Marano, VP Product Management, Arlene Ogden, Director Customer Success, and Ross Ethridge – Lead RRT/PS Engineer discuss SoftNAS 5 and what it brings as well as an updated Support System as well as the help we have to assist in your migration to it.

SoftNAS Cloud NAS now leverages CentOS 8.2,  and a brand new kernel, ensuring that our product benefits from not only the latest Linux patches and CVE security fixes, but also increased performance. These Linux and kernel updates also allowed us to upgrade to the latest version of Samba. In side by side testing, Buurst has seen performance improvements of up to 60% between VMs/instances running SoftNAS 5 and those running our previous 4.4x versions. This 60% improvement was not reflected across all benchmarks, but findings showed a consistent and marked improvement across each of the key benchmarks(throughput, IOPS and latency) in every test run.

SoftNAS continues to offer the same excellent high availability, with our patented SNAP HA and SnapReplicate technology, as well as our No Downtime Guarantee, and still helps to ensure a seamless move of your workload to the cloud with our Lift and Shift solution. Our unparalleled flexibility ensures a seamless transition, without having to make changes to the formatting of your data. Improved performance simply adds some icing to the cake.In essence, SoftNAS, which already improved data performance when compared to solutions such as AWS EFS, has now improved further, operating up to 23 times faster in some cases.  AS you can see below SoftNAS offered significant performance gains in throughput and IOPS, as well as a significant drop in latency.

We have also made some security improvements, beyond ensuring that the latest CVE fixes are supported. Notably, we have locked down our internal firewall configuration, ensuring that by default only the required ports are open. This means, of course, that in addition to a more secure deployment, that in migrating to SoftNAS 5, additional services attached to your SoftNAS virtual machine/instance may require firewall configuration. If you have additional services attached to your SoftNAS deployment, and are upgrading to SoftNAS 5, please contact Buurst support for guidance.

Finally, SoftNAS also now supports OMS Azure Extensions. This allows you to integrate SoftNAS virtual machines into your Azure Operations Management suite for log analytics, alerting and alert remediation capabilities. We feel these improvements are more than enough reason to move to SoftNAS 5, but if not, know that SoftNAS 5 has laid the groundwork for a number of future improvements.  We highly recommend you contact Buurst Support to schedule your migration today.

Learn more:

Crank Up the Performance for Your Cloud Applications
SoftNAS 5 Webinar Recap on Upgrade Process
Get a demo

SoftNAS SNAP HA™ High Availability delivers a 99.999% uptime guarantee that is a low-cost, low-complexity solution that is easy to deploy and manage. A robust set of HA capabilities protect against cloud storage failures to keep business running without downtime.   

SNAP HA monitors all storage components for potential failure and automatically takes over when necessary. It overcomes the challenge of protecting data and application availability across cloud infrastructure, while easily integrating into existing IT deployments. 

Continuous Availability ensures your applications are always available when you need them. Multiple data paths safeguard against hardware, software, and human error. 

• Safeguard critical data against unplanned storage outages. 24 x 7 x 365 
• Feel confident that your business is protected at all times 
• Data protection across multiple availability zones 
• Creating data protection with a design philosophy of simplicity and ease of use. 
• Replicate data so there is an up-to-the-minute recovery 
• Prevent incorrect or outdated data from being made available due to multiple failures across the storage environment 
• Ensure your applications and storage remain available 
• Enjoy the ability to make storage maintenance and upgrades with little or no downtime in their production environment. 

With SoftNAS you can rely on its continuous availability and highly available snapshots, replication, and enterprise-class storage services to drive your business forward. 

Several measures have been taken to ensure the highest possible data integrity of your highly available block storage system. An independent “witness” HA controller function ensures there is never a condition that can result in what is known as a “split-brain”, where a controller with outdated data is accidentally brought online. SNAP HA prevents split-brain using several industry-standard best practices, including the use of a 3rd party witness HA control function that tracks which node contains the latest data. On AWS, shared data stored in highly redundant S3 storage is used.  

Another HA feature is “fencing”. In the event of a node failure or takeover, the downed controller is shut down and fenced off, preventing it from participating in the cluster until any potential issues can be analyzed and corrected, at which point the controller can be admitted back into the cluster. 

Finally, data synchronization integrity checks prevent accidental failover or manual takeover by a controller which contains data that is out of date. The combination of tunable high-integrity features built into SNAP HA ensures data is always protected and safe, even in the face of unexpected types of failures or user errors.  

SoftNAS SNAP HA High Availability

SoftNAS SNAP HA delivers the availability required by mission-critical applications running in virtual machines and cloud computing environments, independent of the operating system and application running on it. HA provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against hardware and operating system outages within virtualized IT and cloud computing environments. SNAP HA:

• Monitors SoftNAS storage servers to detect hardware and storage system failures 
• Automatically detects network and storage outages and re-routes Virtual NAS services to keep NFS and Windows servers and clients operational 
• Restarts SoftNAS storage services on other hosts in the cluster without manual intervention when a storage outage is detected 
• Reduces application and IT infrastructure downtime by quickly switching NAS clients over to another storage server when an outage is detected 
• Maintains a fully replicated copy of live production data for disaster recovery for block storage 
• Is quick and easy to install by any IT administrator, with just a few mouse clicks using the automatic setup wizard 

SoftNAS SNAP HA provides NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI services via redundant storage controllers. One controller is active, while another is a passive standby controller. Block replication transmits only the changed data blocks from the source (primary) controller node to the target (secondary) controller. Data is maintained in a consistent state on both controllers using the ZFS copy-on-write filesystem, which ensures data integrity is maintained. In effect, this provides a near real-time backup of all production data (kept current within 1 to 2 minutes). 

HA Monitor

A key component of SNAP HA is the HA Monitor. The HA Monitor runs on both nodes that are participating in SNAP HA. On the secondary node, HA Monitor checks network connectivity, as well as the primary controller’s health and its ability to continue serving storage. Faults in network connectivity or storage services are detected within 10 seconds or less, and an automatic failover occurs, enabling the secondary controller to pick up and continue serving NAS storage requests, preventing any downtime. 

Once the failover process is triggered, either due to the HA Monitor (automatic failover) or as a result of a manual takeover action initiated by the admin user, NAS client requests for NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI storage are quickly re-routed over the network to the secondary controller, which takes over as the new primary storage controller. Takeover on VMware typically occurs within 20 seconds or less. On AWS, it can take up to 30 seconds, due to the time required for network routing configuration changes to take place. 

In AWS, SNAP HA is applied to SoftNAS storage controllers running in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). It is recommended to place each controller into a separate AWS Availability Zone (AZ), which provides the highest degree of underlying hardware infrastructure redundancy and availability. 

SNAP HA has been validated in real-world enterprise customer environments and is proven to handle hundreds of millions of files efficiently and effectively. The use of block replication instead of file replication supports hundreds of millions of files and directories. 

Making Data Available 24×7

SNAP HA works hand in hand with SoftNAS Cloud NAS data protection features, including RAID, and automatic error detection and recovery, and as a result, reduces operational costs and boosts storage efficiency. Watch SoftNAS Demo here

Performance and cost are critical to consider when building a cloud storage solution for SaaS. You need a system that can ingest data, store it, provide access to it, and cost-effectively do this. Your goal is to develop a cloud storage solution that is highly scalable, highly available, and efficient. 

Cloud storage needs to be resilient. It needs to handle segmentation, service interruptions and outages, hardware failures, and so on. The end–user should not be able to see these issues. Your overall solution needs to be reliable, cost–effective, and highly scalable with high availability. 

The protocols you choose depends on the needs of your application and your user base. Some applications will work best with NFS, others with CIFS. It would help if you considered the impact that each of these choices has on your overall solution. 

It would help if you had a cloud storage solution that is highly scalable, highly available, and efficient. When designing cloud storage, different cost models come into play. Cloud solutions like AWS EFS, Azure Files are expensive and slow. A more practical choice may be to use block storage from a cloud provider and then serve it with a Cloud NAS. A Cloud NAS provides scalability, performance, and reduced costs. 

You have choices from your deployment to your data center upfront costs and the ongoing operations costs. The less you pay, and the less you spend, the better off you are. 

A high performance, low cost, and highly scalable cloud storage solution are vital to meet SaaS offerings’ demand. Designing and deploying a cloud solution is complicated, but Buurst SoftNAS helps by giving you control of your instance size for CPU, memory, and network.  The main advantage is tuning your performance. SoftNAS lets you choose the instance size based on performance needs, flexible, cost-effective, and easy to deploy. 

Buurst SoftNAS is designed with high performance and cost in mind. It connects to your managed service provider storage so that you can easily harness the capacity of cloud storage without the bottlenecks. The solution makes use of a SoftNAS cloud instance that has direct a direct connection to the cloud block storage and provides a private connection to clients owned by your organization.  SoftNAS supports native protocols to optimize performance with your SaaS applications. The solution also includes support for L1/L2 cache with NVME and SSD, better throughput because you might need to run enterprise applications without sacrificing performance. 

Buurst SoftNAS is protocol–agnostic and relies on low-level block storage and an advanced caching layer for logging. Advanced caching results in outstanding performance and extreme affordability. Additionally, it has backup services that enable you to snapshot and recover your files efficiently. SoftNAS offers data deduplication to save storage space. SoftNAS can replicate data to other regions, and availability zones make your data resilient. 

These managed service providers have inconsistent performance characteristics. Both Azure File and AWS NFS limit the number of IOPS  and throughput you can get out of the filesystem by default unless you go to a premium storage account. In contrast, cloud providers allow additional throughput for a premium charge. 

Here are the results of the SoftNAS performance gains over Azure File and AWS NFS: 

Buurst on AWS

Better Latency

Buurst on Azure

Better Latency

SoftNAS gives you the full power of cloud block storage, allowing you to have scalable and predictable performance.  Here are some of the high-level reasons people choose to run SoftNAS: 

• • Scale IOPS to accommodate more high–performance workloads. 
  • Cloud storage performance consistency and raw performance. 
  • Data throughput as well as using all the storage they pay for. 

SoftNAS can be useful to any SaaS company that cares about high performing SaaS applications.

SoftNAS scales IOPS and throughput based on the number and size of the instance, so if SoftNAS offering is exceptionally flexible and scalable. High performance is a business requirement but also a storage requirement. Performance is key to a successful SaaS application because of speed and reliability. 

Useful Links: 

SoftNAS Deployment Guide for High-Performance SaaS

Getting Started:

Buurst
Solutions

Check Also:

Enterprise cloud storage solutions
How to Build a Cloud NAS on Microsoft Azure
Migrate Workloads and Applications to the Cloud

Today I would like to show you how to create highly available NFS mounts for your Kubernetes pods using SoftNAS Cloud NAS. Sometimes we require our microservices running on Kubernetes to be able to share common data. Naturally, a common NFS share would achieve that. Since Kubernetes deployments are all about high availability, then why not also make our common NFS shares highly available as well? I’m going to show you a way to do that using a SoftNAS appliance to host the NFS mount points.

A Little Background on SoftNAS

SoftNAS is a software-defined storage appliance created by BUURST™ that you can deploy from the AWS Marketplace, Azure Cloud Marketplace, and VMWare OVA. SoftNAS allows you to create aggregate storage pools from cloud disk devices. These pools are then shared over NFS, SMB, or iSCSI for your applications and users to consume.

SoftNAS also can run in HA mode, whereby you deploy two SoftNAS instances and can failover to the secondary node if the primary NFS server fails health check. This means that my Kubernetes shared storage can failover to another zone in AWS if my primary zone fails. It’s accomplished by using a floating VIP that moves between the primary and secondary nodes, depending on which one has the active file system.

The Basic SoftNAS Architecture

For this blog post, I’m going to use AWS. I’m using Ubuntu 18.04 for my Kubernetes nodes. I have deployed two SoftNAS nodes from AWS Marketplace. One node is deployed in US-WEST-2A, and the other is deployed in US-WEST-2B. I went through the easy HA setup wizard and chose a random VIP of 99.99.99.99. The VIP can be whatever IP address you like since it’s only is routed inside your private VPC. My KubeMaster is deployed in US-WEST-2B, and I have two KubeWorkers.

One deployed in zone A and the other deployed in zone B. The below screenshot shows what HA looks like when you enable it. My primary node on the left, my secondary node on the right, and the VIP that my Kubernetes nodes are using for this NFS share is 99.99.99.99. The status messages below the nodes show that replication is from primary to secondary is working as expected.

Primary Node

Secondary Node

 The Kubernetes Pods

How To Mount The HA NFS Share from Kubernetes

Alright, enough about the background information, let’s mount this VIP on the SoftNAS from our Kubernetes pods. Since the SoftNAS exports this pool over NFS, you will mount it just like you would mount any other NFS share. In the below example, we will launch an Alpine Linux Docker image and have it mount the NFS share at the 99.99.99.99 VIP address. I’ll name the deployment’ nfs-app’.

The deployment will have the below contents inside of your file nfs-app.yaml. Notice in the volumes section of the deployment, we are using the HA VIP of the SoftNAS  (99.99.99.99) and the path for our NFS share ‘/kubepool/kubeshare’:

Copy and paste the below configuration into a file called ‘nfs-app.yaml’ to use this example:

kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: nfs-app
spec:
  containers:
    - name: app
      image: alpine
      volumeMounts:
        - name: nfs-volume
          mountPath: /mnt/nfs
      command: ["/bin/sh"]
      args: ["-c", "sleep 500000"]
  volumes:
    - name: nfs-volume
      nfs:
        server: 99.99.99.99
        path: /kubepool/kubeshare

So let’s launch this deployment using Kubernetes.

From my KubeMaster, I run the below command:

'kubectl create -f nfs-app.yaml'

 Now let’s make sure the node launched:

'kubectl get pods'

See the below example of what the expected output should be:

Let’s verify from the Kubernetes pod that our NFS share is mounted from that pod.

To do that, we will connect to the pod and check the storage mounts.

We should see an NFS mount to SoftNAS at the VIP address 99.99.99.99.

 Connect to the ‘nfs-app’ Kubernetes pod:

‘kubectl exec --stdin --tty nfs-app -- /bin/sh’

Check for our mount to 99.99.99.99 like below:

'mount | grep 99.99.99.99'

The expected output should look like the below.

We see that the Kubernetes pod has mounted our SoftNAS NFS share at the VIP address using the NFS4 protocol:

Now you have configured highly available NFS mounts for your Kubernetes cluster. If you have any questions or need any more information regarding HA NFS for Kubernetes, please reach out to BUURST for sales or more technical information.

Check Also:

Mounting iSCSI inside SoftNAS to copy data using rsync
SQL Server backups on AWS EC2 using iSCSI shared storage
Off-site Data Replication and Cloud Disaster Recovery for Amazon EC2