SoftNAS Announces Record Growth, Version 3 and New Era of Software-defined Storage

by | Latest News, News Releases

This morning’s press releases announced version 3 of SoftNAS and a glimpse of what we will be showing at VMworld next week.

Growing Demand for Secure Cloud Storage Drives 50% Average Monthly Revenue Growth for SoftNAS in H1 of 2014

The first half of 2014 marked continued record growth for our company, with the addition of hundreds of customers, including many recognized household names. The move to the cloud is certainly afoot for businesses of all sizes, and we are delighted to play a role in helping businesses protect their data and keep applications operational 24 x 7. SoftNAS continues to work closely with Amazon and AWS customers, supporting the cloud movement that’s underway in our industry today.

Today we also announced and released SoftNAS, version 3 – the fastest, most functional and highest quality product we have ever shipped. Version 3 is a software upgrade for existing SoftNAS customers. Version 3 features up to 300% faster performance due to optimizations and tuning, delivering more IOPS and throughput. It also features a new Active Directory wizard for easy integration with AD and granular access control for Windows shares (detailed Windows share attributes are now supported). Read more

SoftNAS 3 Ushers in New Era of Software-defined Storage for VMware Customers

Today we also released support for vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware’s public cloud platform. SoftNAS is the first and only NAS software product available for vCloud Hybrid Service. In addition, we announced support for what we are calling “Hybrid HA(tm)” – the ability to provide non-stop NAS storage between VMware data centers and vCloud Hybrid Service. Hybrid HA uses patent-pending technology that combines the power of premise-based virtualization with cloud computing in a way never before seen in our industry.

SoftNAS Helps VMware® Customers Extend IT Investments to Incorporate Powerful Cloud Storage, Backup and DR Capabilities

We have also invested in certifying SoftNAS V3 (by our QA team) for production use with other VMware tools to provide the most comprehensive software-defined storage solution available for VMware and vCHS. Check out these solutions briefs for more details and some block diagram overviews of what we will be showing at VMworld:

SoftNAS and vCloud Hybrid Service

SoftNAS is now a Unified Cloud NAS Filer for VSAN

Faster backups that take up to 33% less space with SoftNAS and VMware Data Protection

For more details on what’s new in version 3, read the Release Notes here.

Learn more about SoftNAS

See us in booth #801 at VMworld 2014!

SoftNAS becomes #1 Best-selling NAS in the Cloud

SoftNAS becomes #1 Best-selling NAS in the Cloud

by | Awards, Latest News

Our SoftNAS Cloud NAS product has made it onto page 1 of the AWS Marketplace Storage and Backup category. SoftNAS is a Linux-based virtual appliance deployed on public and private cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and VMware vSphere. SoftNAS can also run on RHEL 8.2 if customers prefer over CentOS. Visit the SoftNAS page to learn more about this industry-leading cloud-native NAS solution.

#1 Best-selling NAS in the Cloud

SoftNAS first launched in the AWS Marketplace in July 2013, at which point we were the newbies at #79 (dead last), but you have to start somewhere… Bill and I believed in SoftNAS and the AWS Marketplace’s potential, and we never slowed down or doubted we would achieve success for even a minute.

Clearly, congratulations are in order for a job well done! The SoftNAS AWS alliance team, led by co-founder Bill Hood, has been relentless in their efforts to make this achievement possible. Of course, the product team contributed with a series of well-executed releases of SoftNAS, including the most recent 2.1 release. And we have received incredible support from the AWS solution architects and AWS Marketplace teams, making this achievement possible.

Of course, we truly owe our gratitude and thanks are our SoftNAS customers, who got on board along the way (before SoftNAS was the leading cloud NAS product), provided us with feedback, and worked closely with us to add the features and capabilities we see today.

Buurst SoftNAS NAS provides NAS features in the cloud with a virtual software appliance in the cloud. Beyond offering up to 80% reduction in cloud storage fees, we also provide:

  • SoftNAS provides 5-9’s availability
  • Major protocol support including ISCSI, CIFs/SMB, and NFS
  • Bulk data migration from on-prem to the cloud with patented high-latency network transfer capabilities   

SoftNAS Cloud NAS offers the right blend of price and performance for each workload and application in the cloud by enabling fine-tuned control of data at the Petabyte scale.  

Why SoftNAS Cloud NAS?

You need to control your data. Whether data is on-prem, migrating to the cloud, or in the cloud, keeping data secure, highly available, and accessible is critical for business success. In addition, data growth at the Petabyte scale is becoming the norm for medium to large enterprises; can your current solution meet this requirement?  Buurst SoftNAS is built to meet all these data challenges.  

Standard cloud storage tools meet the basic needs of typical applications running in the cloud; however, these tools are generic and limited in their ability to meet various performance and availability requirements.

Applications and services such as high-performance SaaS solutions or VDI profile management require high IOPS and 5-9 availability as the application and data must always be accessible by customers. SoftNAS was built specifically for these customers to meet their unique performance requirements.

Additionally, the growth of application usage leads to an increase in stored cloud data. SoftNAS holds storage fees in check by charging by performance, not the amount of data stored.

SoftNAS Features

• Data Performance – Increasing performance doesn’t require more storage. It requires a sophisticated cloud storage solution capable of offering substantial throughput, IOPS, and low latency compared to other cloud storage products.

• Data Availability – Capable of delivering 99.999% uptime, our patented cross-zone high availability technology duplicates data across zones to ensure data access when needed. Also, our No Downtime Guarantee ensures your data is available whenever needed.

• Data Cost Control – In addition to charging by performance instead of the amount of data managed, SoftNAS optimizes data stored with various compression techniques to reduce the overall amount of data stored.

• Data Migration – File synchronization and migration services offer continuous data transfer. Our “Lift and Shift” utility enables this service in active production applications without service downtime. Our bulk data movement technology provides up to 200% faster transfer even over high latency, noisy networks.

• Data Control & Security – SoftNAS comes standard with built-in security offerings such as snapshots, and rollbacks. Also, high-performance protocols such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS/SMB are standard.

SoftNAS provides customers a unified, integrated way to aggregate, transform, accelerate, protect & store data, and 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 & the cloud – any data. SoftNAS works with the most popular public, private, hybrid, & premises-based virtual cloud operating systems, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, & VMware vSphere.

SoftNAS Launches 2.1 Upgrade with patent pending Elastic HA and SNAP HA technologies

by | Features, Latest News, News Releases

SoftNAS, the #1 NAS in the Cloud, today launched the SoftNAS 2.1 upgrade for SoftNAS on AWS Marketplace and SoftNAS Professional™ on VMware® ESXi. 5 The upgrade delivers several unique features, including the first patent-pending Elastic HA™ and SNAP HA™ technology. On AWS, Elastic HA uses an enhanced elastic IP address to route NAS client requests (i.e., NFS mounts, Windows CIFS shares and iSCSI block I/O traffic) across a storage cluster of two SoftNAS filers, each with its own controller running within a separate AWS availability zone (AZ). Elastic HA enables non-stop routing of NAS client traffic to the proper SoftNAS controllers, which can be located within the same AZ or across AZ’s. Prior to the introduction of Elastic HA on AWS, it was not possible to create a dual controller configuration that could span AZ’s on AWS for business-critical storage applications and to deliver up to 99.999 percent reliability and seamless automatic failover. Get more details on Elastic HA for AWS. Elastic HA on VMware also utilizes an enhanced virtual IP address to deliver up to 99.999 percent reliability and seamless automatic failover within approximately 20 seconds. Get more details on Elastic HA for VMware SoftNAS supports high availability with its new SNAP HA add-on module, which allows easy HA cluster configuration in less than 2 minutes with just 3 mouse clicks. SNAP HA is the easiest, fastest way to create an HA storage cluster available today. With SNAP HA, premise-based customers running VMware can save up to 70 percent, using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) servers and SSDs, compared to traditional proprietary NAS appliances, while saving additional money on training for their IT professionals who already know VMware, which are leveraged as the storage platform. High availability and SNAP HA are not available for SoftNAS Essentials, a low-cost version ideal for high-density applications like video surveillance, film and video editing, and corporate A/V department needs, which necessitate lots of Serial ATA (SATA) storage without the more premium NAS features. Additionally, the 2.1 upgrade includes a cloud computing storage API and CLI, which makes SoftNAS easy to integrate with CloudFormation templates, auto-scaling groups, and other automation systems used by DevOps teams for agile cloud deployment on Amazon Web Services Marketplace. The upgrade also includes added support for NFSv4 Kerberos and LDAP Support, which enables multi-user security access rights to files and directories managed by the SoftNAS filer, and improved NFS and CIFS performance and throughput tuning for enhanced read and write caching to increase IOPS. SoftNAS 2.1 is the most robust, stable and cost effective storage platform available for the Amazon Web Services platform. SoftNAS is available on an hourly pricing basis. With the addition of CloudFormation templates, SoftNAS provides DevOps teams with a storage platform that’s production-ready, and which can be used to fully simulate production data for use in development and QA staging systems. SoftNAS Pro 2.1 is a more cost-effective alternative to high-priced, proprietary NAS appliances. Best of all, because it runs on VMware ESXi, IT staff already have the skills, and often the existing hardware, needed to deploy SoftNAS Pro. Simply add some SSD drives, SAS and/or SATA to an existing server and (optionally) an additional storage enclosure, and you have a full-featured, enterprise-grade NAS that delivers the same features at a fraction of the cost. Read the Release Notes Read the Press Releases Read the SoftNAS HA Guide

SoftNAS Releases First Cloud Computing Storage API and CLI for DevOps teams

by | DevOps, Features, Latest News, News Releases

SoftNAS has released the first cloud computing storage API and CLI for DevOps teams using Amazon’s EC2 and VMware platforms.

SoftNAS adoption on cloud computing platforms, like Amazon Web Services’ EC2 platform, has been steadily accelerating through Q4 2013 and early here in 2014. One of the things we’re seeing more and more are DevOps organizations in larger companies adopting SoftNAS. As a result, more development shops are looking to incorporate SoftNAS into their entire DevOps process – from Development all the way through QA Test and into Production as a common storage platform.

At the same time, DevOps is automating everything possible, including deployment of the IT infrastructure, to create truly “elastic” systems that expand to deal with demand on the fly during peak periods of traffic, then automatically contract down during non-business hours to minimize operating costs. This is the promise of the cloud – get as much capacity as you need, when you need it, and only pay for what you use. At the same time, the ability to quickly spin up a new QA test or development system makes agile development and testing more efficient and less labor-intensive.

Given that shared storage is a key part of the IT infrastructure for cloud computing, a way to include SoftNAS in CloudFormation templates, Auto-scaling groups, and other cloud computing automation systems is critical, especially for Amazon Web Services customers.

To meet these demands of DevOps and cloud computing operators, SoftNAS has introduced the first cloud storage API and CLI for its flagship SoftNAS product line. The API provides access to the same robust storage administration and management functionality provided by the SoftNAS StorageCenter  GUI, through REST API calls and a simple command-line interface.

The API and CLI support adding EBS and S3 cloud disk devices to SoftNAS, creating and expanding storage pool capacity on the fly, adding new volumes and making them available as NFS and CIFS shares – without direct human intervention. In fact, 95% of everything that can be done via the StorageCenter GUI can now be accomplished using the API or CLI, as well. And the API and CLI are available across all SoftNAS supported virtualization platforms, including AWS and VMware.

This makes SoftNAS the obvious best choice as the cloud computing storage platform for DevOps teams.

Read more about the API and CLI here

SoftNAS Release first storage API and CLI now available for DevOpss teams

by | Features, Latest News, News Releases

SoftNAS adoption on Amazon Web Services’ cloud platform has been steadily accelerating through Q4 2013 and early here in 2014. One of the things we’re seeing more and more are DevOps organizations in larger companies adopting SoftNAS. As a result, more development shops are looking to incorporate SoftNAS into their entire DevOps process – from Development all the way through QA Test and into Production as a common storage platform.

At the same time, DevOps is automating everything possible, including deployment of the IT infrastructure, to create truly “elastic” systems that expand to deal with demand on the fly during peak periods of traffic, then automatically contract down during non-business hours to minimize operating costs. This is the promise of the cloud – get as much capacity as you need, when you need it, and only pay for what you use. At the same time, the ability to quickly spin up a new QA test or development system makes agile development and testing more efficient and less labor-intensive.

Given that shared storage is a key part of the IT infrastructure for cloud computing, a way to include SoftNAS in CloudFormation templates, Auto-scaling groups and other cloud computing automation systems is critical.

To meet these demands of DevOps and cloud computing operators, SoftNAS has introduced the first cloud storage API and CLI for its flagship SoftNAS product line. The API provides access to the same robust storage administration and management functionality provided by the SoftNAS StorageCenter(tm) GUI, through REST API calls and a simple command line interface.

The API and CLI support adding EBS and S3 cloud disk devices to SoftNAS, creating and expanding storage pool capacity on the fly, adding new volumes and making them available as NFS and CIFS shares – without direct human intervention. In fact, 95% of everything that can be done via the StorageCenter GUI can now be accomplished using the API or CLI, as well. And the API and CLI are available across all SoftNAS support virtualization platforms, including AWS and VMware.

This makes SoftNAS the obvious best choice for cloud computing storage platform for DevOps teams.

Read more about the API and CLI here

SoftNAS S3 Cloud Disk for SoftNAS – Sneak Peek

SoftNAS S3 Cloud Disk for SoftNAS – Sneak Peek

by | AWS, Features, Latest News

We are wrapping up QA on a major new feature of SoftNAS – the Amazon S3 Cloud Disk. These cloud disks extend SoftNAS storage to include virtually unlimited, inexpensive cloud disk storage using Amazon’s venerable S3 storage backbone. This is a big deal for our customers who need large amounts of affordable cloud storage.

Here’s how it works.

First, you open an Amazon Web Services account. Next, you install SoftNAS (available in the AWS Marketplace, free micro instance), SoftNAS Essentials or SoftNAS Pro. Note that the S3 Cloud Disks can be used on-premise running on VMware, or in the cloud within any of the AWS regions worldwide.

Next, you simply add a new S3 Cloud Disk to your SoftNAS installation, which appears in the list of available disk devices as shown below:

6

In this example, we have created a 500 TB cloud disk, which is thin-provisioned, so it only takes up actual storage space as you use it.

Next, a storage pool is created using the Amazon S3 Cloud disk, as we see below:

7

You now have up to 500 TB of cloud storage at your fingertips. And it includes all the SoftNAS feature set, including caching, compression, deduplication, scheduled snapshots, etc. – all on top of S3. By itself, S3 storage may not be fast enough for some use cases, especially when running it in a colo or company-owned data center; however, with SoftNAS acting as the NAS ‘front end’ to S3, you can now get the best balance of performance and long-term data durability provided by S3.

And if you’re running S3 Cloud Disks on SoftNAS directly within Amazon EC2, then you’ll get the best performance as everything is running together in the cloud.

More on this exciting new cloud storage feature of SoftNAS will be coming soon. You can see it in action in our booth at AWS re:Invent, November 12 – 15 in Las Vegas. Of course, it will be available for download at that time, as well.