SoftNAS® S3 Disk Overview
About SoftNAS® S3 Disks
SoftNAS® Disks are storage devices created from local storage devices or Amazon S3 Cloud Disks.
Amazon S3 Cloud Disks
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet, specifically designed to make web-scale computing easier. Amazon S3 and SoftNAS S3 Cloud Disks provide 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 systems, as well as within the Amazon EC2 cloud environment.
Cloud disks benefit from SoftNAS® features, including RAM caching, SSD caching, compression, deduplication, scheduled snapshots and read/write clones. This means the best balance of performance and NAS features combined with the off-site data storage redundancy of S3.
Amazon S3 storage subscription costs are industry-competitive, and the EC2 offerings integrate smoothly with Buurst® solutions. Consult Amazon S3 product information 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).
It is strongly recommended that users review S3 Cloud Disk Best Practices prior to creating their instances.