Planning Your Instance

There are numerous considerations when creating any storage solution, and Buurst's SoftNAS product is no exception. The deployment is dependent on the use case, the expected performance levels, the platform you select, and much more. One configuration of SoftNAS will look much different from the rest. For the purposes of a basic proof of concept (POC), many of these elements might seem irrelevant, but they are not. For a POC to be of value, it must provide insight into not only the product but also what you intend to use it for. If your POC is not designed to provide you a baseline of the functionality you expect in a production environment, then it might be a wasted exercise.

To ensure your instance meets your needs, the following considerations are key:

Size – What performance characteristics do you require? A great deal of RAM to handle large-scale data storage? Processing power (vCPU) to handle encryption or compression?
Storage – What performance characteristics do you require from your storage? Is it an infrequently accessed archive? Is it a database serving a demanding application?
Network/Throughput – do you require a great deal of throughput? Does your use case require constant and immediate access to the data in question?
Security – Should data be encrypted? Do you wish to restrict access to a specific IP or IP range? What traffic do you wish to allow?
High Availability - Will you be leveraging SoftNAS' SNAP HA functionality, or is this a stand-alone deployment?

Advanced features of the SoftNAS product are not in scope for this Getting Started Guide, however, the setup presented here will provide a strong foundation for a deployment including these advanced features.

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