Note: SoftNAS® UltraFast™ is a part of our legacy SoftNAS Platinum offering. It will not be visible in versions above 4.4.1 of our SoftNAS product, and is included here for legacy purposes.

The primary difference between this scenario and the first is that replication is not required. Data is stored offsite, and retrieved from the offsite location, rather than replicated locally. This configuration covers illustrates the benefits of UltraFast™ for the following scenarios:

• New projects starting with data in the cloud design (no legacy data migration)
• Cloud data bursting
• Offsite Backups
• Cloud data archival

Performance is key to this scenario as well, as large volumes of data are pushed to the cloud for permanent storage.  Performance in both directions is important, because while data is only retrieved upon request, once the request is made, any delivery issues due to congestion or throughput become glaringly obvious. 

Extending Premise Storage to the Cloud

To send and receive data from the cloud across great distances without impacting performance is the dream for Cloud users. With UltraFast™ this is actually achievable, without significant additional setup and configuration overhead.

1. First, configure cloud storage on the Premise (VMware) instance.  For the purposes of this tech preview, we will configure this using S3 storage. Configure an S3 disk, storage pools and volumes as described in the latter half of VMware: Gettting Started with SoftNAS. 
   
   
2. In AWS, configure a Cloud VM with UltraFast™ enabled. No storage configuration is required, as this instance will serve simply as an accelerator.
   
   
3. Monitor performance in the UltraFast™ performance dashboard. Set up Speedtest,  and compare results according to instructions in Comparing Results: UltraFast vs TCP.