SoftNAS® Essentials

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Last updated: Apr 14, 2020Version comment


Note: SoftNAS® Essentials™ is a legacy SoftNAS offering. While fully supported, significant changes will be seen in any version beyond SoftNAS 4.4.1. 


Secondary data is a challenge for many organizations. You need to maintain it, you need to ensure it is secure and recoverable, but you may not need to access it on regular basis. SoftNAS Essentials provides a solution for secondary storage for cloud backup, disaster recovery, and archive. It can be used on-premises, in the public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment. 

SoftNAS® Essentials provides files services for object storage, lowering the overall cloud storage cost of “cool” secondary data for backup storage, disaster recovery and archive use cases. SoftNAS Essentials enables customers to use the scalability, durability, and low cost of object storage—on-premises, in the public cloud, or in a hybrid cloud environment—all without modifying existing applications and with dedicated and predictable high performance. SoftNAS Essentials is ideal for use as cloud backup, disaster recovery and archive targets.

As SoftNAS Essentials is a part of a single source code base, activated by tiered licensing, most of our documentation applies equally to our Essentials, Enterprise and Platinum. To help our users filter irrelevant portions of the documentation, sections that are relevant to Essentials will be labelled with the 'object-filer' tag. In addition, links to the relevant sections will be provided below. The search bar below is also set to exclude irrelevant material.




Features of SoftNAS® Essentials

  • Low Cost
    SoftNAS® 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® Essentials provides files services for object storage only.

SoftNAS® Essentials does not support:

  • High Availability (HA)
  • Replication
  • Data Synchronization
  • SSD Write Log
  • Block Storage



Benefits of SoftNAS® Essentials

Lower Cost Storage for “Lazy” Secondary Data

Instead of using expensive on-premises equipment to store “lazy” secondary or infrequently accessed data, SoftNAS® Essentials combines with on-premises or public cloud object storage backends to lower the cost of data archival, backup images and disaster recovery.

Reduce Disaster Recovery Datacenter Costs

Disaster recovery datacenter backups and data copies may sit idle for months or years, occupying expensive real estate and incurring high costs for hardware, software, power and cooling. Move your disaster recovery data to the cloud to reduce costs while gaining dynamic scaling and simplifying access for your applications and end users.

Store “Lazy” Secondary Data without Application Re-engineering

Backup and archive software and other third-party applications that create “lazy” secondary data usually store data as files and do not support cloud native storage. Keep existing processes and software while moving data files to the cloud for offsite protection.

  • Hybrid Cloud Enabled
    SoftNAS® Essentials uses off site storage while keeping it readily accessible by on-premises IT systems for disaster recovery, offsite backups and data archival. Eliminate slow and inefficient tape storage requiring special processes and VTL software to access necessary data. Whether you are running object storage in an on-premises private cloud or in public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, SoftNAS® Essentials provides file services across any combination of public, private and hybrid clouds.

  • Seamless Integration

    • SoftNAS® Essentials supports popular object storage products including Amazon Web Services S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, and additional S3-compatible object storage products can be added via a simple wizard.

  • Highly Durable

    • SoftNAS® Essentials leverages the inherent durability of public cloud object storage options.

  • Rich Data Protection and Efficiency

    • SoftNAS® Essentials provides compression, storage snapshots, writable clones and thin provisioning.

High Performance

ObjectBacker™ Backend Storage Acceleration with Patent pending ObjFast™ technology writes data to object storage up to 400% faster than prior SoftNAS® NAS versions, enabling customers to use lower cost cloud object storage backends (e.g., AWS S3 and Azure Blob) with performance levels rivaling that of cloud block storage backends (e.g., AWS EBS and Azure Disk).

We are also proud to announce SoftNAS Essentials version 3.7, optimized for Veeam Availability Suite, is available this month. SoftNAS also announced the achievement of Veeam Ready Archive status, verifying performance for full and synthetic full cloud-backup jobs using SoftNAS® Essentials. Veeam has recently been recognized for the second consecutive year as a Leader in Gartner's  2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup & Recovery Solutions. SoftNAS and Veeam customers now have access to cost-effective multi-cloud storage options, while simultaneously improving RTPO (recovery time and point objectives) for data archival, backup and storage jobs. This partnership underscores SoftNAS’ innovation as a truly cloud-native, 100% software-defined cloud data platform for enterprise control of any data, any cloud, anywhere.

SoftNAS Essentials for Veeam backups provides the performance of a dedicated, always-on enterprise NAS at near block performance on object storage. Combined with patent-pending innovations like ObjFast™ and unique performance-enhancements focused around Veeam backups, SoftNAS Essentials delivers the fastest and best place to store your Veeam backups in the cloud.

For more information on Veeam and SoftNAS Essentials, see the below links: