Your datacenter NAS supports multiple client protocols, and we believe your cloud NAS should do the same. However, choosing the appropriate protocol will increase your performance.

Whether your applications are already in the cloud or you are still migrating to the cloud, you are likely supporting many operating systems and many workloads. SoftNAS delivers the broadest range of client protocols of any cloud NAS vendor by supporting NFS, CIFS, AFP, and iSCSI. Windows supports native CIFS, iSCSI, and POSIX support NFS. Likewise, Linux supports native NFS, iSCSI, and with an add-on CIFS.

The question is when to use what protocol for client and workload?

SoftNAS allows you to share storage as a Unified Filesystem (NFS and/or CIFS) or as a Block Device (iSCSI LUN).

NFS and CIFS Support

SoftNAS supports NFS and CIFS share for the same volume, which is a unified filesystem. Native protocols for both Windows and Linux clients allow access and update to the same files while preventing conflicts by providing unified file sharing and file locking.

Most data that resides on file shares is unstructured. NFS and CIFS volumes can use SoftNAS file-level optimizations such as compression, deduplication, and tiering. These optimization capabilities together can reduce the cloud block storage requirements and cost by 80%.

We were looking for a solution that could scale-up and was easy to deploy and use. SoftNAS Cloud has proved to be flexible and incorporates CIFS support along with other features that allow us to focus on our core business.

– Reza Kertadjaja, Chief Operating Officer IndonesianCloud

NFS and CIFS support clients and servers and are the preferred protocol for clients who need off-cloud access. For those who use Apple Mac in workgroups, AFP protocol is also available.

iSCSI Support

For block-level data transport, SoftNAS supports iSCSI. iSCSI is one of the more popular communications protocols in use today and is native in both Windows and Linux. For Windows, iSCSI also provides the advantage of looking like a local disk drive for applications that require use of local drive letters; e.g., SQL Server snapshots and HA clustered shared volumes.

For Windows and Linux servers that need dedicated connectivity with consistent speed for the most demanding workloads, SoftNAS recommends iSCSI.

With iSCSI server workloads such as file services, SoftNAS recommends deduplication and compression. However, with workloads such as SQL or NoSQL SoftNAS recommends disabling deduplication due to unnecessary overhead.

FTP and SFTP Support

Because SoftNAS is built upon a standard Linux operating system foundation, it also supports common file transfer protocols, such as FTP and SFTP. For certain use cases, these ubiquitous file transfer protocols can be advantageous.

Conclusion

With the broadest protocol support (NFS, CIFS, AFP, and iSCSI) and unified cloud storage in the industry, SoftNAS supports native protocols to clients for both SQL and unstructured data for even the most demanding workloads.

Backed by our strong customer success, SoftNAS is now evolving further to smash the rules of cloud storage, dramatically changing the cloud storage business. SoftNAS is now Buurst – and it’s disrupting the cloud storage industry, and your data is going to be amazing in the cloud.

Storage vendors want to sell you more storage, but here at Buurst, our only motivation is to provide your business better application performance, lower cloud storage costs, and the control and availability you need unlock new opportunities to enable success for your business.

SoftNAS was born from an unmet need for enterprise-grade NAS software to be available to cloud computing and virtual computing customers. As our flagship CloudNAS product, Softnas has hundreds of happy enterprise customers, who all had the same problem: How do I migrate my data to the cloud and get the best performance at the best possible price? At Buurst we are customer first and truly excited serve you. These core values have guided us with everything we have done up to this point and will help us continue to do so as we evolve. We will continue to think about your data differently. We are honored for you to join us on this journey, and to learn how we can help your company achieve its goals. We are and will always be here for you and encourage you to reach out to us with any questions and feedback.

Our executive leadership team, alongside our employees, are here to serve you. Please check out our profiles to get familiar with us:</p

• Rick Braddy, Founder & CTO

• Alex Rublowsky, CMO

• Krupa Amalani CFO

• Vic Mahadevan Chairman, Board of Directors

• Marc Palombo, CRO

Together, let’s be amazing and smash the rules of cloud storage!

Sincerely,
Garry Olah, President & CEO

The cloud data performance company secures $5 million in additional funding

SoftNAS, a leading enterprise-class data performance company, today announced significant changes to its strategic vision and business model, which are aimed at disrupting the cloud storage industry. To amplify these important changes and its breadth of cloud-native solutions, the company will now be known as Buurst.

Buurst recognizes the current model of charging organizations an additional storage fee is not relevant to the cloud and doesn’t position its customers for long-term success. Modern cloud customers require access to data with higher levels of performance and control. Moving forward, Buurst will provide value by delivering data performance, without charging customers a second time for the volume of data they store in the cloud. Cloud service vendors have traditionally charged customers by the gigabyte, terabyte or petabyte of data, however, with its new model, Buurst rejects this approach.

“The traditional model for cloud computing is evolving, and Buurst’s new approach is an example of companies creating inventive models that address organizations’ storage needs. Cloud data platforms and applications have an opportunity to rethink and change IT with innovative pricing models,” said Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, ESG Global. “Offering a more cost-effective way to leverage the cloud long term will be very appealing to customers.”

As an endorsement of this strategy, the company announced $5 million additional capital from its investor base. The additional financing brings the company’s total equity capital raised to $35 million and will be used to scale the growth of Buurst’s business.

“Our customers’ data is growing exponentially and the current approach to data storage means their costs will soon eclipse their entire IT budget,” stated Garry Olah, CEO of Buurst. “We service hundreds of enterprise customers who are turning to us to find a more cost-effective approach to data management in the cloud. We are making it easier and cheaper for our customers to bring all of their data to the cloud.”

Buurst is dedicated to delivering new levels of data performance, control and availability to position businesses to move, access and leverage data quickly. Recently, Buurst reached 1 million IOPS per second, an unprecedented level of performance in the cloud. This capability combined with a patented cross-zone, high-availability with a 99.999 percent uptime guarantee gives customers true choice for their data in the cloud. SoftNAS will remain a core product offering from Buurst and is available on both AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace.

“The cloud computing market is forecasted to total more than $250 billion in 2020, which illustrates a tremendous opportunity,” explained Vic Mahadevan, chairman of the Buurst board of directors. “Additionally, recent global events have highlighted the importance of reliable access to data and the need for exceptional data performance. Buurst’s advanced offering and strategic approach differentiates the company from other data solution providers. This completes the transition of Buurst from a storage company to a data performance company.”

For more information about Buurst’s revolutionary strategy and solutions, register to attend the company’s virtual launch event on Wed., April 15 at 11 a.m. PT. Visit this website to register: https://bit.ly/2yFPh95

About Buurst

Buurst, Inc. is a leading enterprise-class data performance company that delivers migration, cost management, and control of data in the cloud customers need. Buurst optimizes cloud storage decisions for organizations, from migration to granular monitoring and management to storage tiering for cost performance, across all major cloud platforms, ensuring superior performance and optimization of business-critical data. Buurst has offices in Seattle and Houston and employees located across the globe. Buurst powers some of the largest enterprises, including Samsung, Halliburton, T-Mobile, Boeing, Netflix, L’Oréal and WWE. For more information, visit www.buurst.com

Buurst SoftNAS Shares: A Use Case of How we Consolidated EMC VNX File Servers in the Cloud for Easy Access & Sync

Since our early days in 2013, SoftNAS® has seen hundreds of customers move out of their on-premises and colocation datacenters into the cloud. Today, we see an even sharper increase in the number of customers leaving their EMC VNX and other traditional NAS file servers behind, choosing to consolidate and replace aging hardware storage systems with cloud-based NAS file shares. The business impetus to make the change often begins with an upcoming hardware maintenance refresh cycle or a corporate decision to move some or all of its applications into the cloud.

Of course, the users continue to require access to their file shares – over the LAN/WAN from the office and via VPN connections while traveling and working remotely.

How to consolidate file servers for on-premises users into the cloud – a use case

One of the first issues that comes up is how do we seed tens to hundreds of terabytes of live production data from VNX file shares, where it’s actively used today, into the cloud? And then how do we maintain synchronization of file changes during the migration and transition phase until we’re ready to flip the DNS and/or Active Directory policies to point to the cloud-based shares instead?

In this use case, we’re showcasing the implementation of a solution for a well-known media and entertainment company, with dozens of corporate file shares.

A hybrid cloud solution

The initial Seeding Phase involves synchronizing the data from many VNX-based file shares into the cloud. As shown in Figure 1 below, the customer chose a 1 Gbps Direct Connect from the corporate data center to the AWS® VPC for dedicated bandwidth.

The AWS Direct Connect link was used initially for the migration phase, and now provides the high-speed interconnect from the corporate WAN for site-to-site access to the corporate file shares. Later, it became the primary data path connecting the corporate WAN with AWS and the file shares (and other applications hosted in AWS).

As shown above, a SoftNAS Platinum VM was created from a VMware OVA file and operated locally on VMware in the corporate data center. SoftNAS Platinum supports an Apache NiFi-based facility known as FlexFiles.

First, the CIFS shares on the VNX were mounted from SoftNAS. Another copy of SoftNAS Platinum was then launched on AWS® as the VNX NAS replacement. A storage pool was created, backed by four 5-terabyte EBS disk devices, configured in a RAID array to increase the IOPS and performance, and provide the necessary storage space.

A thin-provisioned SoftNAS® Volume was created with compression enabled. Data compression reduced the 20 TB of VNX data down to 12 TB. This left more headroom for growth and since the volume is thin-provisioned, the storage pool’s space was also available for other volumes and file shares that came later.

A SnapReplicate® relationship was created from the on-premise SoftNAS VM running on VMware® to the SoftNAS running in AWS. SnapReplicate performs snapshot-based block replication from the source node to the target. Once per minute, it accumulates all changes accumulated since the last snapshot, then replicates just those block changes to the target system. This is very efficient, and it includes data compression and SSH encryption.

Next, the SoftNAS team created several NiFi data flows which continuously replicated and synchronized the VNX CIFS share contents directly onto a local SoftNAS-based ZFS on Linux filesystem running in the same datacenter on VMware. These flows ran continuously, along with SnapReplicate, to actively seed and sync the VNX files share with the new SoftNAS Cloud NAS filer running in AWS.

After this phase was completed, the on-premises SoftNAS node was no longer required, so the SnapReplicate connection was deleted, leaving a copy of the VNX file share data in the cloud. Then the SoftNAS node was removed from VMware.

During the final phase of the migration, various user communities had to be migrated across dozens of file shares. To maintain synchronization during this phase, the FlexFiles/NiFi flow was moved to SoftNAS Platinum running in AWS, as shown in Figure 2 below.

During a several week period, different departments’ file shares were cut over to use the new consolidated cloud file server. Throughout that period, any straggling changes still arriving on the VNX were picked up and replicated over to SoftNAS in AWS. After all the file shares were verified to be operating correctly in AWS, the VNX was decommissioned as part of the overall datacenter shutdown project.

Successful consolidation of EMC VNX file servers

This project was on a tight timetable from the start. The entire project had to be developed, tested and then used to migrate live corporate file shares from on-premises to AWS in a matter of 45 days in order to stay on schedule for the datacenter closedown project. The project was completed without impacting the user community, who didn’t see any differences in their workflow and business due to where their file share data is hosted.

Find the right fit

Corporations are increasingly choosing cloud hosting for both data and applications. As maintenance contracts come up for renewals of popular EMC VNX, Isilon®, NetApp® and many others, customers are increasingly choosing the cloud over continuing to be in the data center and hardware business. The customer is faced with a fork in the road – stay on the hardware treadmill of endless maintenance, capacity upgrades and periodic forklift replacement – or – move it to the cloud and let someone else worry about it for a change.

Buurst SoftNAS Platinum provides multiple avenues for data migration projects like this one, including the strategy used for this project. In addition to FlexFiles/NiFi and SnapReplicate, there’s also an end-to-end Lift and Shift feature that can be used to migrate both NFS and CIFS from virtually anywhere the data sits today into the cloud. SoftNAS also operates in conjunction with Snowball in several configurations for situations involving hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data.

Request a free consultation with our cloud experts to identify the best way forward for your business to migrate from hardware storage to cloud-based NAS.

Check Also:

Consolidating File Servers into the Cloud
Replacing EMC Isilon, VNX, and NetApp with AWS and Microsoft Azure

High Performance Computing  Solutions (HPC Storage Solutions) in the Cloud – Why We Need It, and How to Make It Work.

Novartis successfully completed a cancer drug project in AWS. The pharma giant leased 10,000 EC2 instances with about 87,000 compute cores for 9 hours at a disclosed cost of approximately $4,200. They estimated that the cost to purchase the equivalent hardware on-prem and associated expenses required to complete the same tasks would have been approximately $40M. Clearly, High-Performance Computing Solutions, or HPC, in the cloud is a game-changer. It reduces CAPEX, and computing time, and provides a level playing field for all – you don’t have to make a huge investment in infrastructure. Yet, after all these years, cloud HPC hasn’t taken off as one would expect. The reasons for the lack of popularity of HPC in the cloud are many, but one big deterrent is storage.

Currently, available AWS and Azure services have throughput, capacity, pricing or cross-platform compatibility issues that make them less than adequate for cloud HPC workloads. For instance, AWS EFS requires a large minimum file system size to offer adequate throughput for HPC workloads. AWS EBS is a raw block device with a 16TB limit and requires an EC2 compute to front. AWS FsX for Lustre and Windows has similar issues as EBS and EFS.

The Azure Ultra SSD is still in preview. It supports only Windows Server and RHEL currently and is likely to be expensive too. Azure Premium Files, still in preview, have a 100TB share capacity that could be restrictive for some HPC workloads. Still, Microsoft promises 5GiB per share throughput with burstable IOPS to 100,000 per share with a capacity of up to 100TB per share.

Making Cloud High Performance Computing (HPC) storage work

For effective High Performance Computing solutions in the cloud, it is necessary to have predictable functioning. All components of the solution (Compute, Network, Storage) have to be the fastest available to optimize the workload and leverage the massive parallel processing power available in the cloud. Burstable storage is not suitable – withdrawal of any resources will cause the process to fail.

With the SoftNAS Cloud NAS Filer, dedicated resources with predictable and reliable functioning become available in a single comprehensive solution. There’s no need to purchase or integrate separate software and configure it. This translates to an ability to rapidly deploy the solution from the marketplace. You can have SoftNAS up and running in an hour from the marketplace.

The completeness of the solution also makes it easy to scale. As a business, you can select the compute and title storage needed for your NAS and scale up the entire Virtual cloud NAS as your needs increase.

Greater customization can be made to suit the specific needs of your business by choosing the type of drive needed, and choose between CIFs and NFS sharing with high availability.

HPC Solutions in the cloud – A use case

SoftNAS has worked with clients to implement cloud HPC. In one case, a leading oil and gas corporation commissioned us to identify the fastest throughput performance achievable with a single SoftNAS instance in Azure, in order to facilitate migration of their internal E&P application suite.

The suite was being run on-prem using NetApp SAN and HP Proliant current-gen blade servers, and remote customers connected to Hyper-V clusters running GPU-enabled virtual desktops.

Our team ascertained the required speeds for HPC in the cloud as:

• Sustained write speeds of 500MBps to single CIFS share

• Sustained read speeds of 800MBps from a single CIFS share

High Performance Computing in the Cloud PoC – our learnings

• While the throughput performance criteria were achieved, the LS64s_v2 bundled nVME disks are ephemeral, not persistent. In addition, the pool cannot be expanded with additional nVME disks, just SSD. These factors eliminate this instance type from consideration.
• Enabling Accelerated Networking on any/all VMs within an Azure solution is critical to achieve the fastest performance possible.
• It appears that Azure Ultra SSDs could be the fastest storage product in any Cloud. These are currently available only in beta in a single Azure region/AZ and cannot be tested with Marketplace VMs as of time of publishing. On Windows 2016 VMs, we achieved 1.4GBps write throughput on a DS_v3 VM as part of the Ultra SSD preview program.
• When testing the performance of SoftNAS with client machines, it is important that the test machines have network throughput capacity equal or greater to the SoftNAS VM and that accelerated networking is enabled.
• On pools comprised of nVME disks, adding a ZIL or read cache of mirrored premium SSD drives actually slows performance.

Achieving Cloud HPC Solutions/Success

SoftNAS is committed to leading the market as a provider of the fastest Cloud storage platform available. To meet this goal, our team has a game plan.

• Testing/benchmarking the fastest EC2s and Azure VMs (ex. i3.16xlarge, i3.metal etc.) with the fastest disks.
• Fast adoption of new Cloud storage technologies (ex. Azure Ultra SSD)
• For every POC, production deployment, or internal test of SoftNAS, measure the throughput and IOPS, and document the instance & pool configurations. This info needs to be accessible to our team so we can match configurations to required performance.

SoftNAS Solutions for HPC Linux Workloads 

This solution leverages the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), and AWS clustered placement groups with i3en family instances and 100 Gbps networking. Buurst testing measured up to 15 GB/second random read and 12.2 GB/second random write throughput. We also observed more than 1 million read IOPS and 876,000 write IOPS from a Linux client, all running FIO benchmarks. 

The following block diagram shows the system configuration used to attain these results.

The following block diagram shows the system architecture used to attain these results.

The NVMe-backed instance contained storage pools and volumes dedicated to HPC read and write tasks. Another SoftNAS Persistent Mirror instance leveraged SoftNAS’ patented SnapReplicate® asynchronous block replication to EBS provisioned IOPS for data persistence and DR. 

In real-world HPC use cases, one would likely deploy two separate NVMe-backed instances – one dedicated to high-performance read I/O traffic and the other for HPC log writes. We used eight or more synchronous iSCSI data flows from a single HPC client node in our testing. It’s also possible to leverage NFS across a cluster of HPC client nodes, providing eight or more client threads, each accessing storage. Each “flow,” as it’s called in placement group networking, delivers 10 Gbps of throughput. Maximizing the available 100 Gbps network requires leveraging 8 to 10 or more such parallel flows. 

The persistence of the NVMe SSDs runs in the background asynchronously to the HPC job itself. Provisioned IOPS is the fastest EBS persistent storage on AWS. SoftNAS’ underlying OpenZFS filesystem uses storage snapshots once per minute to aggregate groups of I/O transactions occurring at 10 GB/second or faster across the NVMe devices. Once per minute, these snapshots are persisted to EBS using eight parallel SnapReplicate streams, albeit trailing the near real-time NVMe HPC I/O slightly. When the HPC job settles down, the asynchronous persistence writes to EBS catch up, ensuring data recoverability when the NVMe instance is powered down or is required to move to a different host for maintenance patching reasons. 

Here’s a sample CloudWatch screengrab taken off the SoftNAS instance after one of the FIO random write tests. We see more than 100 Gbps Network In (writes to SoftNAS) and approaching 900,000 random write IOPS. The reads (not shown here) clocked in at more than 1,000,000 IOPS (less than the 2 million IOPS AWS says the NVMe can deliver – it would take more than 100 Gbps networking to reach the full potential of the NVMe). 

Here’s a sample CloudWatch screen grab taken off the SoftNAS instance after one of the FIO random write tests.

One thing that surprised us is there’s virtually no observable difference in random vs. sequential performance with NVMe. Because NVMe comprises high-speed memory that’s directly attached to the system bus, we don’t see the usual storage latency differences between random seek vs. sequential workloads – it all performs at the same speed over NVMe. 

The level of performance delivered over EFA networking to and from NVMe for Linux workloads is impressive – the fastest SoftNAS Labs has ever observed running in the AWS cloud – a million IOPS and 15 GB/second read performance and 876,000 write IOPS at 12.2 GB/second.

This HPC storage configuration for Linux can be used to satisfy many use cases, including: 

• Commercial HPC workloads 
• Deep learning workloads based upon Python-based ML frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, MxNet, Sonnet, and others that require feeding massive amounts of data to GPU compute clusters 
• 3D modeling and simulation workloads 
• HPC container workloads.

SoftNAS Solutions for HPC Windows Server and SQL Server Workloads 

This solution leverages the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and AWS clustered placement groups with i3en family and 25 Gbps networking. Buurst testing measured up to 2.7 GB/second read and 2.9 GB/second write throughput on Windows Server running Crystal Disk benchmarks. We did not have time to benchmark SQL Server in this mode, something we plan to do later. 

Unfortunately, Windows Server on AWS does not support the 100 Gbps EFA driver, so at the time of these tests, placement group networking with Windows Server was limited to 25 Gbps via ENA only. 

The following block diagram shows the system architecture used to attain these results. 

The following block diagram shows the system architecture used to attain these results.

To provide high availability and high performance, which Buurst calls High-Performance HA (HPHA), it’s necessary to combine two SoftNAS NVMe-backed instances deployed into an iSCSI mirror configuration. The mirrors use synchronous I/O to ensure transactional integrity and high availability. 

SnapReplicate uses snapshot-based block replication to persist the NVMe data to provisioned IOPS EBS (or any EBS class or S3) for DR. The DR node can be in a different zone or region indicated by the DR requirements. We chose provisioned IOPS to minimize persistence latency. 

Windows Server supports a broad range of applications and workloads. We increasingly see SQL Server, Postgres, and other SQL workloads being migrated into the cloud. It’s common to see various large-scale enterprise applications like SAP, SAP HANA, and other SQL Server and Windows Server workloads that require both high-performance and high availability. 

The above configuration leveraging NVMe-backed instances enables AWS to support more demanding enterprise workloads for data warehousing, OLA, and OLTP use cases. Buurst SoftNAS HPHA allows high performance, synchronous mirroring across NVMe instances with high availability and a level of data persistence and DR required by many business-critical workloads. 

Buurst SoftNAS for HPC solutions

AWS i3en instances deliver a massive amount of punch in CPU horsepower, cache memory, and up to 60 terabytes of NVMe storage. The EFA driver, coupled with clustered placement group networking, delivers high-performance 100 Gbps networking and HPC levels of IOPS and throughput. The addition of Buurst SoftNAS makes data persistence and high availability possible to more fully leverage the power these instances provide. This situation works well for Linux-based workloads today. 

However, the lack of Elastic Fiber Adapter for full 100 Gbps networking with Windows Server is undoubtedly a sore spot – one we hope that AWS and Microsoft teams are working to resolve. 

The future for HPC in AWS looks bright. We can imagine a day when more than 100 Gbps networking becomes available, enabling customers to take full advantage of the 2 million IOPS the NVMe SSD’s remain poised to deliver. 

Buurst SoftNAS for HPC solutions operates very cost-effectively on as few as a single node for workloads that do not require high availability or as few as two nodes with HA. Unlike other storage solutions that require a minimum of six (6) i3en nodes, the SoftNAS solution provides cost-effectiveness, HPC performance, high availability, and persistence with DR options across all AWS zones and regions. 

Buurst SoftNAS and AWS are well-positioned today with commercially off-the-shelf products that, when combined, clear the way to move numerous HPC, Windows Server, and SQL Server workloads from on-premises data centers into the AWS cloud. And since SoftNAS is available on-demand via the AWS Marketplace, customers with these types of demanding needs are just minutes away from achieving HPC in the cloud. SoftNAS is available to assist partners and customers in quickly configuring and performance-tuning these HPC solutions. 

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Breaking the Million IOPS Barrier on AWS with NVMe for HPC