Amazon Elastic Band Storage Provisioned IO/s and SoftNAS Combine

Using Amazon Web Services and the recently introduced EBS Provisioned IO/s with up to 4,000 IO/s per volume, NAS specialist SoftNAS, LLC created an Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) virtual environment and got more performance by stripping multiple EBS volumes.

SoftNAS CTO Rick Braddy created the environment with RAID-10 configuration across 5 EBS Instances and achieved sustained read speeds of near 9,900 IO/s.

"This level of performance far exceeds what is currently available on the cloud and provides for an excellent end user experience in even a demanding virtual desktop environment," said CEO Bill Hood. "The challenge a lot of IT managers face is the recognition that fast storage is critical to the user experience especially with critical applications such as desktop virtualization. However, fast storage can be expensive and generally limited to a proprietary hardware chassis, until now."

"With SoftNAS our customers can build and manage extremely fast and redundant storage solutions on both cloud and physical systems. SoftNAS manages and enhances the performance of both cloud-based and hardware- based solutions," said Hood.

"NAS functionality such as tiered storage, stripping, deduplication, compression, etc., all add performance enhancements to the underlying storage. SoftNAS is one of the few software packages that ‘decouple’ NAS functionality from the hardware," said Hood. "This means SoftNAS drives storage as a commodity to be managed, backed up and maintained on the most reliable, fastest and lowest cost platform available. Management of storage is evolving from proprietary systems to open source solutions that enhance performance regardless of the particular underlying mechanism. This is accomplished using our flagship product, StorageCenter. Finally, a single interface that manages your commodity storage no matter how that storage is delivered."

Hood continued: "SoftNAS is setting performance benchmarks like today’s test at nearly 10,000 IO/s. We’re not resting on our laurels; we’re already putting in the research needed to push through the next great speed threshold."

SoftNAS can be delivered using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and is available and is delivered with Amazon’s EC2 and combined with EBS storage in the Amazon Marketplace or using existing standard server and storage infrastructure or even existing storage solutions. For SMBes, it offers a portal into cloud computing that is affordable and offers user experience. Whether delivered as an Amazon machine image or within a private cloud or both, the results are the same: fast, reliable performance and seamlessly managed storage.

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