SoftNAS Cloud can SoftNAS can leverage both block storage (such as the varieties of EBS volumes available on AWS) and object storage such as S3. This flexibility is one of the key features of SoftNAS Cloud. It It can, however, introduce some complexities when determining your requirements. As performance is based not only on the instance size selected but also the storage characteristics, leveraging different types of storage in the same solution will affect your performance.
EBS Volumes
To determine what this effect might be, we must first understand the individual performance characteristics of each storage type. The table below outlines the available block storage options for Amazon Web Services:
Solid-State Drives (SSD) | Hard disk Drives (HDD) | |||
Volume Type | General Purpose SSD | Provisioned IOPS SSD | Throughput Optimized HDD | Cold HDD |
Description | General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads | Highest-performance SSD volume designed for mission-critical applications | Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads | Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads |
Use Cases |
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Volume Size | 1 GiB - 16 TiB | 4 GiB - 16 TiB | 500 GiB - 16 TiB | 500 GiB - 16 TiB |
Max. IOPS**/ Volume | 10,000 | 20,000 | 500 | 250 |
Max. Throughput/ Volume | 160 MiB/s | 320 MiB/s | 500 MiB/s | 250 MiB/s |
Max. IOPS/ Instance | 65,000 | 65,000 | 65,000 | 65,000 |
Max. Throughput/Instance | 1,250 MiB/s | 1,250 MiB/s | 1,250 MiB/s | 1,250 MiB/s |
Dominant Performance Attribute | IOPS | IOPS | MiB/s | MiB/s |
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For more information on EBS volume types, click the following links:
Simple Storage Service (S3)
AWS object storage, known as Simple Storage Service, or S3 has its own characteristics. S3 serves as a repository for Internet data. It provides access to reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy by enabling you to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from within Amazon EC2 or anywhere on the web. Amazon S3 stores data objects redundantly on multiple devices across multiple facilities and allows concurrent read or write access to these data objects by many separate clients or application threads. You can use the redundant data stored in Amazon S3 to recover quickly and reliably from instance or application failures.
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