Understanding SoftNAS Cloud

SoftNAS®, Inc. is the #1 software-defined Network Attached Storage (NAS)

vendor in the cloud with thousands of virtual appliance deployments

globally and multiple petabytes under management. Building on this patented

enterprise-class NAS foundation, SoftNAS is pioneering a rapidly-emerging

technology layer of cloud infrastructure that industry analysts call multi-

cloud data control and management. The SoftNAS Cloud Data Platform

consists of three SoftNAS Cloud® products designed and optimized for specific

use cases in multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud environments with support for Amazon

EBS Block and S3 Object Storage. SoftNAS customers include many of the

Global 2000 and SoftNAS Cloud has been a storage category leader on The

AWS Marketplace since 2013 and is a highly aligned AWS Advanced Technology

Partner, the highest level alliance partner certification.

Control Any Data. Any Cloud. Anywhere.™

SoftNAS Cloud Data Management Products for AWS Add Breakthrough NAS Performance, Protection, Flexibility

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Why Use SoftNAS on AWS?

SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise and SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials for AWS extend

the native storage capabilities of AWS and feature the POSIX-compliant

and required storage access protocols needed to create a virtual cloud NAS,

without having to re-engineer existing customer applications. SoftNAS Cloud

products allow customers to migrate existing applications and data to AWS

with NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI or AFP support. Customers gain the

performance, data protection and flexibility needed to move

to the cloud cost effectively and ensure successful project

outcomes (e.g., snapshots, rapid recovery, mirroring,

cloning, high-availability, deduplication and compression).

Each customer’s journey to the cloud is unique, and SoftNAS

solutions are designed to facilitate adopting cloud projects

according to what makes the most immediate business sense, resulting in

the highest return on invested resources (budget, people, time). Whether

your need is to consolidate file servers globally, utilize the cloud for data

archival or backup, migrate SaaS and other business applications, or carry

out Big Data or IoT projects, SoftNAS products on AWS deliver effective,

tangible results.

We have been very impressed with the SoftNAS support team that is just a fingertip away and with the ability to achieve a reliable infrastructure that scales easily and stores unlimited amounts of data.

- Michel BernabelaINTELLISoft N.V.

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Which SoftNAS Cloud Product is Right for You?

SoftNAS has two shipping and commercially available products for use on AWS:

SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise and SoftNAS Cloud Essentials. There is also a Beta feature

set available to test in the upcoming release of SoftNAS Cloud® Platinum, the

company’s super-NAS, flagship cloud data platform solution. Ask these questions

to determine which SoftNAS Cloud product is right for your cloud storage needs

or particular use case:

SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise• Are you looking for an enterprise-class cloud NAS solution to support your

mission-critical, primary-data storage needs on AWS? A solution that provides the highest levels of data protection, flexibility, performance, control, and availability possible?

• Do you want a virtual cloud NAS that can deliver high-performance I/O and throughput to allow you to support extremely large application workloads?

• Do you need a cloud data solution that runs on AWS and provides the flexibility to tune to select the price and performance for each of your projects plus utilizes any combination of: S3 Object storage or EBS Magnetic, SSD or Provisioned IOPS?

SoftNAS Cloud Essentials• Is your less-frequently accessed data growing faster than your on-premises

storage capacity is expanding? • Are you looking for a cost-effective solution that will allow your organization

to move large amounts of secondary data and use Amazon S3 Object storage for cloud archiving and backup?

• If leveraging cost-effective Object storage on S3 fits your cloud data require-ments, explore SoftNAS Cloud Essentials. With Cloud Essentials, S3 Object storage I/O performance comes close to the performance levels of EBS Block storage at a fraction of the cost.

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SoftNAS Cloud Platinum (Beta)• Are you looking to Lift and Shift your application portfolio from costly legacy

on-premises systems into the cloud? Is the sheer volume and complexity of your applications keeping you from being able to migrate to the cloud according to desired project timeframes?

• Do you need a fast, simple way to do bulk data transfers into the cloud? Are you looking for a solution that automates this process with maximum speed and efficiency?

• Have you struggled finding an easy and powerful way to do massive data consolidation, ingestion and integration into the cloud? Has this inability impacted planned Big Data and IoT project goals and plans? Do you see the need for a super-NAS solution that simplifies your most demanding cloud data project requirements?

When to use SoftNAS Cloud versus Amazon EFS?

SoftNAS Cloud is a best-in-class software-defined, virtual, unified Cloud NAS/

SAN storage solution for businesses that need control of their data as well as

frictionless and agile access to AWS cloud storage. SoftNAS Cloud supports

AWS EBS and S3 Object storage. SoftNAS Cloud is deployed by thousands of

organizations worldwide, supporting a wide array of application and workload

use cases. Amazon EFS provides basic and scalable file-based NFS access for use

with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. As a basic NFS filer, Amazon EFS

is easy to use, allowing quick and simple creation and configuration of file sys-

tems. The multi-tenant architecture of EFS accommodates elastic growth and

scales up and down for AWS customers that require basic cloud file services. 4

SoftNAS Cloud solved a huge problem for us. We were challenged with managing both active and backup data. While this is not a simple problem, it was straightforward to solve and implement with SoftNAS Cloud.

- Rudy PataroMagHub

SoftNAS.com

If you need more than a basic cloud filer on AWS,

SoftNAS Cloud is the right choice: 1. For mission-critical cloud data requirements that demand low latency,

high-availability with the highest-performance cloud storage I/O possible. SoftNAS ObjectBacker™ increases storage I/O performance up to 400% faster, giving customers performance approaching that of EBS at the price of S3 storage.

2. For environments with multiple cloud storage projects that require an enterprise-class, virtual NAS storage solution that provides flexible and granular pricing and control with performance and instance selection capabilities.

3. For customers with low cloud storage requirements (low TBs) that don’t want to overprovision storage to get desired performance.

4. For requirements that demand the broadest POSIX-compliant and full NFS 4.1 feature set requiring storage access support.

5. For enterprises requiring multi-cloud environment (i.e. AWS & Other Clouds) capabilities, flexibility and data risk mitigation.

6. For organizations that need the industry’s most complete NAS filer feature set, including data protection provided by the patented cross-zone high-availability architecture, at rest and in flight encryption (360-degree Encryption™) and full replication using SnapReplicate™. Additional features include: High-Availability (SNAP HA™* and DCHA**), Snapshots, Rapid Recovery, Deduplication, Compression, Cloning and Mirroring.

* = SNAP HA is available only in SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise and SoftNAS Cloud Platinum

** = DCHA is available as an optional add-on to SoftNAS Cloud Essentials via BYOL only

How and Why is SoftNAS Cloud a Better Way to Store & Control Data? Moving to SoftNAS Cloud on AWS is helping thousands of public organi-

zations and private enterprises around the world move from the old way

of controlling and efficiently utilizing data storage into a new and better

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way. Never-ending backups, storage capacity bottlenecks, proliferation of

file servers, and existing applications — that are preventing organizations

from moving to the cloud due to complexity and the spiraling data storage

costs — become a thing of the past.

SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise and SoftNAS Cloud Essentials

on AWS enable a new way, a better way, of storing,

controlling and managing your data. Both solutions

are more cost-effective than expensive, inflexible,

on-premises NAS – both in terms of money spent

on storage and resources required to provision new

datacenter facilities. Whereas it can take weeks and

millions of dollars to acquire new hardware, a cloud NAS

virtual appliance can be provisioned in less than an hour

with SoftNAS Cloud on AWS, all without tying up limited

and valuable IT and DevOps resources. With traditional

business data exploding beyond control, which is forecasted

by IDC to exceed 163 Zettabytes by 2020, now is the time to evaluate and

adopt the industry’s most powerful, cloud-native NAS virtual storage appliance

software for your growing multi-cloud data control and management needs.

With SoftNAS, you have full control of any data on any cloud. Anywhere.

30-Day Free Trial of SoftNAS Cloud on AWS Put SoftNAS to the Test and Try it for 30-Days.

Contact a SoftNAS representative for more details and a demo to learn more

about both SoftNAS Cloud products on AWS and the Beta of SoftNAS Cloud

Platinum, so that you make the right decision.

30 days or less and 20TB or less AWS Marketplace Free Trial is available. Just

launch and go in minutes. You can get started with a free 30-day trial at

www.softnas.com/trynow.

Learn More:

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SoftNAS Cloud Beta

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In the beginning it was very difficult to transition from a private datacenter to the cloud, but because of the ease of use, high level of support and flexibility to expand the

storage — we could tran-sition to the cloud

In turn, this has al-lowed us to move more of the core business processes to the cloud. The most important outcome from using SoftNAS was opening an awareness to the migration experience.

- Keith SoniNDEMAND

SoftNAS.com

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