SoftNAS Narrows the Cloud Storage Performance Gap

Houston, Texas-based SoftNAS released the newest version of its Cloud NAS product, promising a performance boost for enterprises that may be sitting on the sidelines of the cloud storage revolution.

There are good arguments for keeping data stored on-premises as well as on the public cloud. One of the main reasons organizations balk at migrating their business data to the cloud, despite the alluring possibility of slashing costs, is the performance penalty incurred when files traverse corporate networks, the public internet and the storage systems of faraway cloud data centers.

With the latest version its cloud-enabled network-attached storage (NAS) filer solution, SoftNAS has increased cloud object storage speeds by up to 400 percent. The improvement is made possible by the company’s ObjFast technology, explained SoftNAS CEO and founder Rick Braddy.

“We have incorporated patent-pending ObjFast technology to deliver increased performance with SoftNAS Cloud NAS and meet customer demands from cloud object storage, including AWS S3 and Azure Blob storage,” Braddy told Enterprise Storage Forum. “ObjFast streamlines the I/O so you can get the maximum number of parallel streams in and out at the maximum rate without overrunning object storage in the cloud. The challenge to do this well, is in moving the data fast enough without breaking the speed limit where you get penalized, and doing it in a highly parallel way so you can maximize throughput.”

By addressing the performance gap that plagues many cloud-based storage services, businesses can start letting go of the past-their-prime storage infrastructures that are holding them back, Braddy added. “Now customers can replace expensive, aging hardware-based storage and on-premises NAS, SAN and file servers with limitless, highly durable and highly available cloud object storage,” he said.

Suitable use cases include migrating business applications without having to re-engineering them and creating backup repositories that offer fast data retrieval. Cloud NAS can also be used for global file server consolidation projects and as a replacement for disaster recovery data centers, said Braddy.

Cloud NAS is available in a variety of editions, allowing customers to tailor the solution to their needs.

The Developer edition, available on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure cloud marketplaces, offers users up to 250GB of storage in perpetuity. Next up the ladder is the General Purpose Edition that provides a cost-effective balance between cloud storage, CPU and RAM resources.

For businesses that require faster access to their data can use the High Performance Edition, which harnesses the power of more CPU cores and RAM to provide brisk read performance. Finally, the fittingly-named Extreme Performance Edition supports high-speed network connections and “thousands of current file system connections,” providing robust storage services for intensive workloads, according to the company.

In terms of storage services, paid Cloud NAS plans include block replication, snapshots, compression and block replication, deduplication and compression, along with the company’s SNAP HA high availability technology. Security-wise, SoftNAS cloaks customer data in encryption, both at-rest and over the wire.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enteprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.