SoftNAS 2 Upgrade

SoftNAS LLC has launched the SoftNAS 2 upgrade to lead into AWS re:Invent, the gathering of developers from the Amazon Web Services community.

Chief among the features – including an upgrade to CentOS 6.4 and to the latest ZFS file system on Linux with additional Linux services – is the availability of the SoftNAS Cloud Disk with support for Amazon S3 as the Internet block device, providing mass cloud storage available for storage.

“Due to previous speed restrictions, the S3 storage has been widely used for backup storage, but with SoftNAS Cloud Disks, we can finally utilize the S3’s global availability and redundancy for live NAS and business storage use cases,” said Rick Braddy, SoftNAS founder and managing partner.

Support is available for an unlimited number of S3 Cloud Disks, and each disk can be thin-provisioned up to 4PB, so customers may pay for space only as needed, bypassing up-front costs.

“This flexibility is great for businesses that have the need to manage and share big data results at a lower cost from anywhere on the Internet,” Braddy said.

Amazon S3 storage costs start at just $0.01/GB/month in low quantities and are available as low as $0.0055/GB/month when combined with volume discounts. Thus this solution is the price/performance leader for storage in the AWS cloud.

It can also be copied for long-term archive storage into AWS Glacier, and Cloud Disks benefit from all features for, “the best balance of local performance and NAS features, combined with off-site storage redundancy,” Braddy said.

The upgrade will be available for all existing SoftNAS products, including the SoftNAS Cloud on the AWS marketplace.