Buurst is a trusted provider of high performance cloud applications, notably a Cloud NAS, object storage filer, and cloud data management software called SoftNAS, which allows companies to migrate their data and applications into the cloud without re-engineering.  Founded in 2012 as a cloud-first software company, Buurst (formerly SoftNAS)holds several patents, including patents for cross-zone high-availability and failover and for a congestion avoidance algorithm that accelerates writes to object storage. Fortune 500 to SMB companies across multiple industry verticals trust SoftNAS with their mission-critical data. Buurst provides a frictionless customer experience and is the only cloud software storage company to offer a No Storage Downtime Guarantee™.

NAS is a common IT term for Network Attached Storage that enables data and file sharing using popular protocols like NFS and CIFS/SMB. iSCSI is typically associated with SAN (Storage Area Networks). NAS storage systems that support NFS, CIFS/SMB, and iSCSI are termed “unified” storage. SoftNAS provides unified storage designed and optimized for high-performance, higher than normal I/O per second (IOPS) and data reliability and recoverability. It also increases storage efficiency through thin-provisioning, compression and deduplication.

SoftNAS is a hybrid cloud data integration product, combining a software-defined, enterprise-class NAS virtual storage appliance, backups and data movement; and data integration/replication for IT to manage and control data centrally. Customers save time and money while increasing efficiency. 

SoftNAS supports Cloud deployment on AWS and Azure, and on-premise deployment via VMware. 

Yes, SoftNAS uses reservationless ZFS snapshots.

Yes, you can create any other user on softnas and still be able to login to the UI with full privileges. However, you must first add the user to the 'softnas group'. 

Yes. SoftNAS patented SNAP HA® delivers a low-complexity solution for high-availability clustering that is easy to deploy and manage. A robust set of HA capabilities provides constant access to your data even when datacenter infrastructure failures such as datacenter, server, network and storage system failures to keep your business running without storage downtime.

Yes, SoftNAS Cloud NAS is delivered as a Virtual Storage Appliance and runs as a virtual machine on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure or VMware vSphere.

Yes, SoftNAS supports SCSI-3 persistent reservations.

SoftNAS leverages the local ephemeral SSD storage and RAM in the instances for the caching system. It’s a great part of our solution because we can enable any combination of compute, caching and attached storage based on the wide variety of the cloud offerings. We encourage customers to customize based on their needs. As new instances come out or improve, we immediately encourage customers to make the change! This is impossible to achieve with the conventional on-premise storage model.

Not at all! SoftNAS StorageCenter™ is the easy-to-use, intuitive GUI to manage SoftNAS Cloud NAS. The management software is accessed via your web browser and provides simplicity for creating standard mounts, including NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI storage volumes, which can be pooled into RAID backed arrays to customize redundancy and performance as well as setting advanced features.

If the copy replication is broken the, upon restart the copy resumes from the last known good snapshot.  DeltaSync takes place after a fail over event which only copies the differences since the node was active.

ZFS snapshots are based on tree snapshots which are stored considerably different than how block snapshots were traditionally done. The Copy On Write file system creates a map as to where the changed blocks are stored instead of traditional method of what was overwritten. This gives the ability to have unlimited snapshotting and facilitates the benefit of the little or no space that current ZFS snapshots consume. The below Article from Jeff Bonwick of Sun gives a great visual depiction of how tree snapshots are structured.

https://www.snia.org/sites/default/orig/sdc_archives/2008_presentations/monday/JeffBonwick-BillMoore_ZFS.pdf

SNAP HA™ monitors all critical storage components, ensuring they remain operational.  When there is an unrecoverable failure in a system component, another storage controller detects the problem and automatically takes over ensuring no downtime or business impacts occur.

You can refer to the below section for more information: /wiki/spaces/SD/pages/92996750

We leverage AES 256 via LUKS. You can find more information on this subject here: https://www.softnas.com/docs/softnas/v3/html/security.html

The ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) absorbs bursts or steady streams of incoming, synchronous write operations by rapidly recording the writes in high-speed, mirrored SSD storage, then returning quickly to the caller. This makes synchronous writes  operate at maximum speed. Later, when there is less I/O overhead, the writes which are cached in the ZIL are written to long-term pool storage. The ZIL is flushed every 5 seconds 

On AWS some customers use a small (5 GB) Provisioned IOPS SSD (never direct attached ephemeral SSD) to absorb massive write bursts. It does not need to be large because it only buffers a small timeframe of data.

Windows Failover Cluster requires a special block size and must be set manually:

1. Use iSCSI as the storage protocol on SoftNAS, iSCSI Initiator on the MS servers.
2. You have to create the pools via the GUI, but create the volumes via cli to get this.

         Example below using a 40G volume and thick provision:

          zfs create -V 40G -b 4k pool01/iscsi01 (crate the vol with a 4k block size)

          zfs get volblocksize pool01/iscsi01 (verify)

          zfs set reservation=40G pool01/iscsi01 (set the reservation size)

         zfs get reservation pool01/iscsi01 (verify)

         zfs list (verify)

    3. Format the volumes to have 4k block size for NTFS. (ZFS uses 128k by default)

The below command will list the 15 directories with the highest disk usage. The -x option will make it only search the root file system and ignore any other mounted systems specially ZFS pools, as scanning them may take long time and affect the performance.

du -xh / 2>/dev/null | sort -h -r | head -n 15

If you would like to check for a certain pool, you can replace "/" with "/Your-Pool"

We can put a pair of HA enabled nodes on premise for local storage and connect to Azure/AWS for cloud capacity. We do indeed enable replications and/or snap shots to the Azure/AWS hosted instances. Separate shares on Azure/AWS can be used for expanded capacity.

SoftNAS  encrypts your data while it is at-rest and also when it is in transit—we call it 360-degree encryption. SoftNAS believes that each business or organization should control the keys to their data—so only you have the encryption keys, not SoftNAS nor your underlying storage cloud platform provider.

Yes, we a CentOS based for our ZFS implementation (not Illumos… thank goodness).

We use two nodes for a high availability (HA) solution. The performance scales by changing the instance's type rather than node scale out. We can attach to a combination of back end storage options (block and object) for up to 16PB of capacity as well.

The SnapReplicate® feature provides block-level replication between two SoftNAS instances. SnapReplicate between source and target SoftNAS instances sends all data through encrypted SSH tunnels and authenticates using RSA PKI. Data is encrypted in transit using industry-standard ciphers. The default cipher for encryption is Blowfish-CBC, selected for its balance of speed and security, but you can use any cipher supported by SSH, including AES256-CBC.

Feel free to use the bench marking tool that you want that allows you to best represent your exact work load Read/Write percentage.

RPO is an acronym for Recovery Point Objective which refers to the most recent point in time for which you will be able to recover.  SoftNAS has a default RPO of 60 seconds. i.e. After the initial synchronization of data between two SoftNAS nodes, SnapReplicate will sync changes between SoftNAS appliances every 60 seconds.  Provided the amount of changed data over the past 60 seconds completes its transfer prior to the next sync your RPO is equal to that target. (The network and compute may be adjusted based on actual needs to keep RPO as low as possible).

RTO is an acronym for Recovery Time Objective or the amount of time required to recover from a failure. SoftNAS employs various mechanisms to enable customers to quickly recover from accessibility issues.  This recovery ranges from manual efforts to automated HA events.  Depending upon the architecture of the system, the nature of the ‘event’ RTO can be as low as 30 seconds.

There is a 7 day grace period where everything will continue to function to allow you to purchase a new license without interruption.

Once the 7 day grace period expires, you should expect the following:

1. Scheduled snapshots will stop taking place.
2. Replication will stop.
3. HA will deactivate but the VIP will remain associated to the source node so that clients can continue to access the volume mount points.
4. You will lose Storage Manager administrative access.
5. Only two pages will function in Storage Manager.
   1. Licensing console. This allows you to enter your new license information once you have it procured.
   2. Software Updates console.

Your data remains intact and undisturbed. When SoftNAS is not running, NAS clients connecting via NFS, iSCSI, or CIFS will not have access to NAS services, which will be restored when the SoftNAS is powered back on. If data is in production with SNAP HA®, a failover would occur and the data would still remain available.

SoftNAS supports SMB v3 and NFS v3 and v4.

Our admin interface, Storage Center, is web based. It’s on either node and it unifies multiple SoftNAS deployments.

Open Source software can be enhanced by a wealth of programmers, which means bugs are easier to find and fix, and the software is much more secure. Although SoftNAS  is not Open Source, it is based on trusted Open Source industry standard software–Linux and ZFS–which allows an open and free architecture, so your data is never locked into one platform.  

The latest major release of SoftNAS is SoftNAS 5.  For the latest release number see Release Notes. There you will find notes on the latest release, and any fixes or improvements to the product.

Yes, you can have any number of EC2 instances with shared access to iSCSI targets and LUNs, NFS volumes and Windows CIFS shares. File locking and user permissions are maintained, so application operate as expected with a file server.