Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet, specifically designed to make web-scale computing easier. Amazon S3 and SoftNAS S3 Cloud Disks provide access to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Other vendors also provide S3 based storage solutions, including Cloudian, Dunkel, Century Link, and many others. SoftNAS supports integration of these cloud disk extenders, and other vendors based on the same technology. Guidance on adding S3 based cloud disks to SoftNAS is provided below, including best effort support for vendors not yet added to our wizard.
Note: For Amazon AWS S3 Users only, SoftNAS recommends the use of VPC Endpoints. For more information on VPC Endpoints, see S3 Cloud Disk Best Practices.
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If adding your S3 Cloud Disk through Amazon, the following wizard pop-up will appear, allowing you to connect by entering credentials, associating a region and a bucket, as well as configuring disk size and encryption.
Note: The settings below apply equally to all cloud disk extenders listed in the sections following. If using another cloud disk extender, please follow the guidance provided by said vendor.
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Next, choose cloud disk options:
Maximum Disk Size
This value can be between 1 GB and 4095 TB (4 petabytes). This is the maximum cloud disk size for the device. As cloud disks are thin provisioned, there are no Amazon S3 storage costs until data is actually stored in a SoftNAS Cloud® storage pool and volume.
When choosing a Maximum Disk Size, please keep in mind that a SoftNAS Cloud® license will be required for the maximum amount of storage planned for use. VMs will consume approximately 30GB of disk space.
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The S3 Cloud Disk is created, automatically partitioned, and ready for use.
Note: The Extra Disk Info column shows the S3 bucket name and region where the bucket is located.
The next step is to Create a Storage Pool which uses the already-partitioned S3 cloud disk.
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