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.

SoftNAS Delivers Breakthrough Performance for Veeam Cloud Backups, Resulting in Rapid, Reliable, Flexible RTPO with Significant Cost Savings for Customers Using Cloud Storage

HOUSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SoftNAS®, a cloud data platform company and leading software-defined NAS provider for the cloud, announced SoftNAS Essentials version 3.7, optimized for Veeam Availability Suite, is available this month. SoftNAS also announced the achievement of Veeam Ready Archive status, verifying performance for full and synthetic full cloud-backup jobs using SoftNAS Essentials. SoftNAS and Veeam customers now have access to cost-effective multi-cloud storage options, while simultaneously improving RTPO (recovery time and point objectives) for data archival, backup and storage jobs. This partnership underscores SoftNAS’ innovation as a truly cloud-native, 100% software-defined cloud data platform for enterprise control of any data, any cloud, anywhere.

Biz’s can now access cost-effective multi-cloud storage & improve recovry time/RTPO 4 data archival, backup, storage

Tweet this

Enterprises continue to struggle with managing vast amounts of data, including backups. Research conducted by The Taneja Group, found that 41 percent of planned public cloud workloads target backups¹. Cloud backup is one of the fastest growing technologies being adopted. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Storage Technology, 2017, “backup of data generated natively in public cloud is an emerging requirement as cloud providers only offer infrastructure high availability and disaster recovery, but are not responsible for application or user data loss.”²

SoftNAS Essentials with patent pending ObjFast™ technology accelerates object storage I/O performance to near the levels of native cloud block storage, but at a significantly lower cost. Enterprises can deploy SoftNAS Essentials flexibly, either on-premises or via public cloud providers to achieve superior TCO for secondary data: cloud backup, disaster recovery and cloud archive repositories.

“What’s really innovative is how this solution enables mounting a cloud-based NFS backup repository from on-premises, overcoming the usual performance gaps with slow cloud gateways and making Veeam synthetic full merges fly in the cloud. We are proud to be partnering with Veeam and delivering cutting-edge multi-cloud solutions that enable our customers to move more data to the cloud,” said Rick Braddy, CEO, CTO, and Founder of SoftNAS.

Veeam and SoftNAS enable customers to protect their cloud deployments and extend the benefits of on-premises storage to the public cloud. SoftNAS Essentials customers can leverage Veeam to create an always-on enterprise NAS that achieves near block storage performance using object storage.

“We welcome SoftNAS as a valued member of the Veeam Alliance Partner program. This membership means customers can take full advantage of SoftNAS software-defined cloud NAS filer capabilities via public clouds,” said Carey Stanton, VP Global Business and Corporate Development at Veeam Software. “By joining the Veeam Ready program in addition to the Veeam Alliance Partner program, SoftNAS is working with Veeam to develop technologies that can transform customers’ environments.”

Thousands of businesses including public, private, and global organizations, including many of the Fortune 2000, use SoftNAS to migrate business and SaaS applications to the cloud, consolidate file servers and for backup storage. A free 30-day trial version of SoftNAS is available for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and VMware.

“The public cloud destination for backup storage makes more sense than ever with off-site data protection being a best practice,” said John-Marc Clark, SoftNAS VP of Marketing. “We are thrilled to help Veeam formulate a cloud validation process for Veeam Ready Archive that leverages our extensive experience with AWS and Azure.”

“As a Veeam partner, Relus is seeing a surge in requests for ways to ensure Veeam backup copies can be done reliably, fast and cost effectively. We hear constantly that customers are overflowing with on-premises data and come to us to help move their on-prem VMware backups on Veeam safely offsite to AWS. SoftNAS Essentials and Veeam make it possible to backup SMB and enterprise-size secondary storage jobs leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This opens a host of application and cloud data migration and storage projects to AWS which also require professional services expertise,” said Mike Ostrowski, Senior Vice President Cloud Delivery, Relus Cloud.

Data growth is expected to reach over 163 zettabytes by 2025 according to analyst firm IDC.³ “With so much growth, organizations are looking to the cloud as an elastic way to store and process their data, and increasingly in a multi-cloud environment. But customers often lack an integrated view across their data storage resources and services. Building a unified view of data across a diverse set of IT platforms is a key need today, and addressing this will enable businesses to more effectively derive value from their data,” stated Deepak Mohan, Research Director, Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, IDC.

¹ Source: Taneja Group, Multi-cloud Primary Storage Survey, October 2017.
² Source: Gartner, “Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2017,” Pushan Rinnen, John McArthur, 19 July 2017.
³ Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by Seagate, Data Age 2025, April 2017.

About SoftNAS
Control Any Data. Any Cloud. Anywhere.™

SoftNAS®, is a leading software-defined NAS provider for the cloud. Our mission is to be the fabric for business data in the cloud. SoftNAS provides a software-centric architecture that enables frictionless data management and control of any data, any cloud, anywhere. The SoftNAS cloud data platform and CloudFabric™ architecture provide 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, web services, SQL, NoSQL, and the cloud – any kind of data. SoftNAS provides the enterprise-class data security, protection, performance, and high-availability required to safely, predictably, and reliably operate IT systems and applications in the cloud.

SoftNAS works with the most popular public, private, hybrid and premises-based cloud operating systems, including Amazon Web Services™, Microsoft® Azure™ and VMware vSphere®.