SoftNAS Cloud 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 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:

For more information on EBS volume types, click the following links:

• AWS Documentation: EBS Volume Types

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.

SoftNAS can leverage S3 Storage within its infrastructures, creating disks, pools and volumes, much as you would with EBS block storage. It offers similar performance characteristics to General Purpose SSD. However, this performance cannot be improved by stacking disks into a RAID configuration, for example.

For a more in depth look at S3 best practices and considerations see the following links:

• AWS Documentation: Amazon S3
• S3 Compatible Cloud Disk Extender Best Practices