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 or AWS Virtual Machine (M4.2Xlarge or better)
• Azure Cool Blob Storage 
• SoftNAS  Cloud® Essentials