As organizations struggle with managing the vast amounts of data they produce, cloud backups are becoming one of the fastest growing technologies adopted. SoftNAS has long provided flexible, cloud-native, 100% software-defined cloud data platform for enterprise control of any data, any cloud, anywhere. With Veeam's acknowledged expertise, SoftNAS is now able to offer a clear solution to our customer's considerable cloud backup needs. 

For this guide, we will be concentrating on our low-cost, high performance object storage solution, SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials. Any of SoftNAS Cloud®'s editions can be used for archive and backup purposes, but with SoftNAS Cloud® Essential's focus on low-cost secondary tier storage, and improved object-storage performance, it presents an ideal balance for most customer backup and archive needs.

Features of SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials

• Low Cost
  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials reduces the cost for “lazy” secondary storage, making it ideal for large scale archival, backup target and disaster recovery workloads.

• High Performance
  Accelerated back-end object storage writes, deletes, edits and reads – approaching native block storage performance levels. 

• Snapshots and Rollbacks
  Protecting and recovering your data is easy by creating scheduled or manual snapshots that can rollback your data to a point-in-time—perfect for combating malware and ransomware.

• Multi-Protocol Support
  File access to back-end object storage via NFS, CIFS/SMB with Active Directory, AFP (Apple File Protocol) and iSCSI block services.

• Encryption
  Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and only the customer possesses the encryption keys.

• Access Control
  Integration with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP, which provides secure access to customer data.

• Storage Elasticity
  Grow and shrink your storage requirements on an as needed basis, including thin-provisioning and storage pooling.

• File Services for Object Storage
  SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials provides files services for object storage only.

SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials is a software defined storage appliance providing the file path for Veeam archive storage to Object Storage in the Cloud.  SoftNAS provides the critical connectivity and integration between Veeam and the Azure platform.

Solution Components:

This solution contains the following components:

• Existing on premise data center or co-location
• Existing Veeam Backup solution
• Network connection –  Azure ExpressRoute
• Azure Virtual Machine (DS4v2 or better)
• Azure Cool Blob Storage 
• SoftNAS  Cloud® Essentials
  
  

ExpressRoute

A direct, high speed network connection between your host system and the cloud is recommended for best results. Data must be transferred quickly and reliably whenever needed/scheduled.

Virtual Machine

A virtual machine with a 10 GBe network is required to host SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials. On Azure, the instance size should be DS15v12 or better in order to provide adequate performance.

Cool Blob Storage

Azure Cool Blob storage is the best selection for this architecture because of its low cost and the expectation that most of the data will be written and never read.  If data is truly archive in nature, then this storage option provides the best value to hold these files.

SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials

SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials is a software defined storage appliance providing the file path for Veeam archive storage to Object Storage in the Cloud.  Without this storage appliance the translation and data packaging would not occur and this solution would not function.  SoftNAS provides the critical connectivity and integration between Veeam and the Cloud Platform of your choice.

Benefits of ObjFast™ Technology

Without ObjFast™

Unless optimized, backup operations can overload the backend cloud object system, resulting in 500 errors. These errors in turn require processing power to handle, which can cause a synthetic Full Backup to take up to 11 times longer than an on-premise backup. This has long been a factor in reducing cloud adoption for backup solutions.

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With ObjFast™

With SoftNAS Cloud's ObjFast™ optimization in place, data flow is controlled, maintaining an optimal transfer rate, preventing 500 errors from derailing your backup process. With SoftNAS, Synthetic Full Backups only take 1.5 times longer than on premises solutions, removing one barrier to enjoying the cost benefits of cloud adoption.

Getting Started (SoftNAS recommends the below steps are followed in sequence)

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