About SoftNAS S3 Cloud Disks

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier. Amazon S3 and SoftNAS S3 Cloud Disks provides access to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives anyone access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to customers.

As shown below, SoftNAS S3 Cloud Disks are block devices created from Amazon S3 storage.

Each S3 Cloud Disk device can store up to 4 petabytes (PB) of data. An unlimited number of S3 Cloud Disks are supported. Each S3 Cloud Disk is thin-provisioned, so storage space is only consumed when data is actually written to the device and actually used.

S3 Cloud Disks are attached to SoftNAS Storage Pools and provide unlimited cloud storage. Each cloud disk is encrypted and authenticated to provide added security. 

S3 Cloud Disks can be created and accessed on-premise from VMware ESXi, as well as within the Amazon EC2 cloud environment.

Cloud disks can also be combined in a RAID-1 mirror configuration with local disks (VMware) or EBS disks (AWS), so you get the best of both worlds: I/O performance plus highly-redundant cloud storage in real-time.

Cloud disks benefit from other SoftNAS features, including RAM caching, SSD caching, compression, deduplication, scheduled snapshots and read/write clones. This means you get the best balance of performance and NAS features combined with the off-site data storage redundancy of S3.

Amazon S3 storage costs start at just $10 per TB per month in lower terabyte quantities and are available as low as $5 per TB per month in higher quantities. Consult Amazon S3 product information pricing for latest details and pricing.

S3 Cloud Disks can also be copied for long-term archive storage into AWS Glacier (functionality that is built into the AWS console).

Amazon S3 Cloud Disk Configuration

The S3 Cloud Disk Extender provides the addition of block devices that can be added to SoftNAS at any time. Each S3 Cloud Disk block device includes a pseudo-device designation of /dev/s3-NNN, where NNN is a sequential device number starting from zero.

Use the S3 Cloud Disk Extender configuration dialog shown below to configure and add S3 Cloud Disk devices to SoftNAS.

AWS Access Key

The AWS Access Key is an authentication identifier which uniquely identifies an AWS (Amazon Web Services) account.

AWS Secret Key

The AWS Secret Key is the secret password component used to authenticate the AWS Access Key and provide access to Amazon S3.

Region

S3 Cloud Disks can be created in any of the worldwide AWS regional data centers. By specifying a specific region for S3 Cloud Disks, the data can be maintained within only that specific data center. Benefits of regional S3 Cloud Disks include:
a) the data remains within the country where the regional data center is located, to meet certain regulatory compliance requirements, and
b) S3 Cloud Disks are located nearby the SoftNAS EC2 instance, reducing latency and improving throughput and performance.
By default, S3 Cloud Disks and their associated S3 buckets are created in the "U.S. Standard" region (US East, Virginia) and replicated to other U.S. regions in Oregon and N. California, and provide eventual consistency for all requests. This region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

Bucket Basename

The Bucket Basename is used for automatically generating unique bucket names. The bucket base name is used as a prefix for an automatically generated bucket name for the S3 Cloud Disk. This base name makes it quick and easy to generate any number of S3 Cloud Disks, each with a common base name. Choose a base name that's meaningful for your application, company or use of S3 Cloud Disks. Valid bucket base names are comprised of lower-case characters only.

S3 Bucket

This is the S3 Bucket name that will be associated with the S3 Cloud Disk. All bucket names within S3 must be unique. S3 bucket names can be any lower-case alpha and/or numeric text characters, plus embedded dashes and periods within the bucket name string.

By default, a unique bucket name is automatically generated for your convenience, using the Bucket Basename as a prefix, plus a random number and suffix of "s3disk" followed by the S3 Cloud Disk device number.

You can type your own bucket name into the S3 Bucket field using lower-case alpha and/or numeric characters, plus embedded dashes and periods within the bucket name string.

To select an existing bucket, click on the drop down menu and choose from the available S3 buckets shown.

Maximum Disk Size

Enter a numeric value and choose the units (GB or TB) representing the maximum size of the S3 Cloud Disk. Since S3 Cloud Disks are thin-provisioned, this value is the maximum disk size this S3 Cloud Disk can grow to over time as data is added to the device.

Please note that while a very large S3 Cloud Disk can be created, the usable storage must fit within the licensed SoftNAS storage maximum size available.

Encrypted disk

S3 Cloud Disk contents can be encrypted and signed. When encryption is enabled, SHA1 HMAC authentication is also automatically enabled, and any blocks that are not properly encrypted and signed are rejected. When encryption is enabled, data compression is also automatically enabled.

AES-256 CBC encryption is used to provide a balance of performance and security strength.

The encryption key is determined based upon the Disk Password provided.

Create S3 Cloud Disk

After filling out the form with the desired values, press the Create S3 Cloud Disk button to create the S3 Cloud Disk device.