With the introduction of SoftNAS Cloud® Essentials, SoftNAS Cloud® NAS is changing its name to SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise, in order to differentiate it from the new object-storage focused addition to our family. With this change, SoftNAS is also introducing several new platinum beta features, made available to all of our customers for evaluation and testing prior to launch. In order to ensure existing clients day to day operations are not affected by the risks of evaluation software, our platinum beta features remain dormant code until the client selects one of the platinum features, and accepts the prompt indicating they are aware that they are opening a beta feature, not recommended for production environments.
SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise is a network attached storage (NAS) virtual appliance. Our products are commercial-grade storage management solutions for businesses that require high-speed, reliable storage at affordable prices.
SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise supports the following platforms:
- Cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2® and Microsoft® Azure™
- On-premise Computing Infrastructure such as VMware vSphere®.
Architecture and Technology
SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise runs as a Linux®-based, 64-bit CentOS redistribution guest OS treated as a VM in a virtual server environment. In many use cases, storage devices are attached to the physical hardware layer, then presented to SoftNAS Cloud® as a VM running Linux.
SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise operates on an industry-standard Linux platform, and uses a derivative of the Zettabyte File System® (ZFS), an open-source project originally released on OpenSolaris® by Sun Microsystems, Inc. This makes SoftNAS Cloud® able to leverage many ZFS features and add layers of functionality for NAS solutions in virtual computing and cloud computing.
An Apache webserver provides robust, secure access along with Secure Shell® (SSH). Storage is accessible via TCP/IP protocols including NFS v3, NFS v4, SMB/CIFS (Microsoft® Windows File Shares), and iSCSI.
SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise is packaged with a primary administration interface called SoftNAS StorageCenter™, which provides commercial-grade storage administration and management functionalities for businesses of all sizes. 
Cloud Computing:
SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise provides the highly-available network storage backbone needed for business-critical cloud applications in the following environments:
Premise-Based Computing:
SoftNAS Cloud® Enterprise installs from a download to act as a virtual server appliance. Run as many instances of SoftNAS Cloud® VM as are needed in any of the following environments:
SoftNAS Cloud®, SoftNAS StorageCenter™, SnapReplicate™, and SNAP HA™ are trademarks of SoftNAS Inc. All other trademarks referred to in this guide are owned by their respective companies.