by Buurst Staff | Latest News
I’ve been super busy lately getting ready for our upcoming launch of a new product, SoftNAS, which is 100% focused on cloud computing. The product will be the first true on-demand NAS for Amazon EC2 customers that’s available on an hourly basis through the AWS Marketplace.
Pricing will be announced during the launch, but I can say this… there will also be a free, full-featured version of SoftNAS available, as well.
More as we get closer to launch day!
Meanwhile, check out the completely-redesigned SoftNAS Pro product pages. How do you like the Mac dock-style feature icons? Should be natural enough for Mac users… but what about everyone else?
We’re well underway with Active/Passive HA and automatic failover. We also have a working prototype of Active/Active clustering, which is still in R&D. And we’re close to finishing a new Disk Devices wizard that will make it super-easy to partition large numbers of disk devices. We have some customers who need to partition several hundred drives, and doing each one manually is not going to cut it, so the new “Partition All” feature will be a great improvement.
Oh – did I forget to mention that we’re also about to launch SoftNAS 1.2? Here’s a sneak-peek at the new SoftNAS Console that’s part of 1.2, for VMware (there’s no console on EC2). Here’s a couple of screenshots.
The first one is the main console page, which shows the current IP address and login URL for StorageCenter.
The next one is the main configuration menu.
As you can see, the SoftNAS Console is similar to the VMware host console, used to configure networking, date/time and other appliance level configuration, so it should be a snap to make use of it. To log into the Linux desktop, just press F8 and the SoftNAS Console exits and launches the desktop session.
Stay tuned – lots more coming soon!
Rick
by Buurst Staff | Features, Latest News
We reached an important milestone today with the SoftNAS Beta release.
Based on our QA testing results, the Beta is very solid on VMware and Amazon EC2.
The VMware ESXi platform, which we use in development and day to day operations with SoftNAS, is solid as a rock – as usual. We see throughput up to line speed between the SoftNAS storage server and workload servers. VMware continues to be the leading hypervisor for premise-based, enterprise deployments for good reason – it’s mature, robust and just works.
For the first time, we now support SoftNAS across all of the standard Amazon EC2 regions (except for Sydney, which is relatively new and will come later). SoftNAS for EC2 is now available on these Amazon Machine Images (AMI):
ami-6df27104 – US East (N. Virginia)
ami-a443cb94 – US West (Oregon)
ami-aec6e7eb – US West (California)
ami-d6c3cea2 – EU (Ireland)
ami-cedc9f9c – Asia Pacific (Singapore)
ami-d066ded1 – Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
ami-92d30b8f – South America (Sao Paulo)
Deployment on EC2 is super-fast and easy – on the order of several minutes to spin up a new SoftNAS instance! Amazon makes this process extremely easy and productive. We observed good performance, up to 100 MB/sec (line speed), on basic EBS volumes with SoftNAS cache memory. Best of all, there’s no hardware to mess with – just point, click, deploy and go! And EC2 is solid as a rock, performing flawlessly in all our tests.
This release includes iSCSI target and initiator support. Setting up iSCSI targets and connecting to them from Windows Servers, Unix servers and VMware ESXi worked flawlessly and performed as expected, as well.
This release also introduces scheduled snapshots – hourly, daily and weekly snaps. There’s a new snapshot control panel that displays the snapshots for each volume (or all volumes at once). Snapshots can be cloned into writable volumes with the push of a button.
The release notes provide a more complete list of features and fixes in this release.
Behind the scenes, we’ve been busily working with a number of early adopters with some very interesting projects and use cases. We are very excited about the GA release of SoftNAS, which will be the same run-time image for all the platforms, with a few added features like SnapReplicate and a few others.
Okay – time for a brief break to recover from the march to release day this week for me… then back into the salt mines to develop the last major feature for version 1 – SnapReplicate. I’m very excited about SnapReplicate – it’s going to make it super-easy to configure SoftNAS for redundancy and failover.
Onward!
