News
SoftNAS™ Achieves EC2 Performance Approaching 10,000 IOPS
SoftNAS™ Charts Unknown Territory Using Amazon’s EBS to Achieve Performance Approaching 10,000 IOPS
IOPS in this range were heretofore unavailable through a public cloud provider. Amazon’s new Elastic Block Storage Provisioned IOPS and SoftNAS combine to set cloud performance records.
Using Amazon Web Services and the recently introduced EBS Provisioned IOPS with up to 4,000 IOPS per volume, network attached storage specialist SoftNAS, LLC, created an Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) virtual environment and got even more performance by stripping multiple EBS volumes. SoftNAS CTO, Rick Braddy created the environment with RAID 10 configuration across 5 EBS Instances and achieved sustained read speeds of near 9,900 IOPS. “This level of performance far exceeds what is currently available on the cloud and provides for an excellent end user experience in even a demanding virtual desktop environment,” said CEO Bill Hood.
SoftNAS™ Secures Significant Private Equity Funding
After a flurry of interest from several high-profile firms, SoftNAS™ has received a substantial investment of private equity funds. For founder and CEO Bill Hood, the only surprise was how quickly investors stood up and took notice of the company’s fundamentals and growth potential. Considering that the company has from day one opened up new territory in the cloud storage sector, the infusion of fresh capital could not have come at a more opportune time. Private equity funding will allow SoftNAS to both improve upon its already superior flagship product and expand its market reach.
3/18/2013 Enhancements result from increased SoftNAS™ use in customer production deployments
Software updates improve production storage operations for improved visibility into space usage, snapshot space consumption, online volume resizing and more.
3/12/2013 SoftNAS™ Releases Enterprise iSCSI for SoftNAS Professional Edition
SoftNAS, LLC today announced availability of upgraded iSCSI capabilities for SoftNAS™ Professional Edition, supporting Amazon EC2, VMware® and Microsoft® Hyper-V®. The new iSCSI stack includes high-performance write-caching and a simplified iSCSI administration interface – including “single-click” iSCSI volume publishing.
2/27/2013 SoftNAS™ Releases Big Data Capabilities at Little Data Prices™
SoftNAS, LLC today announced immediate general availability of its SoftNAS™ Professional Edition and SoftNAS Essentials™ products, for Amazon EC2, VMware® and Microsoft® Hyper-V®. Two free downloads are available, a 60-day free trial of the SoftNAS Professional Edition, and the free SoftNAS Essentials Edition.
To download, visit the download page
2/19/2013 End of SoftNAS™ Early Access Program
The SoftNAS Early Access Program is now concluded and downloads are no longer available at this time. EAP customers may continue to use the SoftNAS EAP product with its built-in full-function SoftNAS Professional Edition license through the end of February, at which time the beta license will expire. EAP customers have a free 1 TB SoftNAS Essentials license, which may be installed and used at any time.
Thank you for your participation in our early access and beta testing program. The assistance and feedback from our hundreds of beta testers has helped improve the quality of the product and its readiness for general availability, which will be on February 27.
Important: Please be aware that if you use the Software Updates function in the EAP product, it will reset the built-in EAP license to the new built-in 100 GB SoftNAS Essentials license that will ship by default within the GA product. Please install your SoftNAS Essentials license key before applying the 1.0.0 or later software updates.
2/12/2013 Developers of SoftNAS™ Counting Down to February 27 Launch Date
Developers of SoftNAS, the State-of-the-Art, Versatile, Networked Storage and Disaster Recovery Solution, Counting Down to February 27 Launch Date.
“With SoftNAS, we are making powerful, complex storage technologies simple, reliable and affordable,” said Bill Hood, founder and CEO of SoftNAS, LLC. ”Instead of multiple devices or software deployments with steep learning curves, our technology was designed to work within existing architectures. Anyone who understands virtualization can have SoftNAS up and running in no time. It comes as no surprise to us that CRN put us on their list of the year’s hottest storage technologies.”
2/4/2013 SoftNAS™ Release Candidate 1 Now Available for Early Access Program Customers
SoftNAS™ RC1 has been released to SoftNAS QA teams and our hundreds of beta testers participating in the company’s Early Access Program. EAP customers can use the Software Updates feature to automatically download, install and update existing installations from Beta 2 to RC1. RC1 includes many fixes and improvements to the product, including SnapReplicate™, plus addition of Active Directory support for CIFS sharing with Windows domain integration, and offline support for offline NAS use cases.
Dynamic kernel rebuilds are incorporated to ensure Linux kernel updates result in automatic rebuild of the SoftNAS and ZFS drivers for proper integration. The Amazon EC2 AMI’s were rebuilt from the ground up using the latest CentOS 6.3, version 19 kernel, with a larger 30 GB root partition to accommodate add-on software such as dm-crypt encryption, which several beta customers have successfully deployed in conjunction with SoftNAS for additional cloud data security on Amazon EC2.
1/28/2013 CRN Picks SoftNAS™: #7 in Tech 10 Hot Storage Technologies for 2013
CRN has included SoftNAS in its 2013 lineup of hot storage technologies for 2013, alongside other high-tech storage technologies including the latest SSD’s, blade storage servers, all-flash solid state storage arrays, Rackspace OpenStack cloud block storage, among others.
CRN cut the storage industry into 10 different slices, each of which features one representative product highlighting the changes going on in the industry. Included are cloud storage, game-changing hard drive and SSD offerings, and a variety of hardware and software combinations that provide features and benefits beyond what each individual part could offer. Here’s a look at some products that showcase just how dynamic and diverse today’s storage market has become.
1/10/2013 SoftNAS™ Beta 2 Released with SnapReplicate™
The Beta 2 version of SoftNAS is now available to EAP customers for deployment and use on VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon EC2 worldwide. This release contains the SnapReplicate module, which supports advanced replication between two SoftNAS systems for backup, failover and disaster recovery purposes. Amazon EC2 users will like the ability to use SnapReplicate to create fault-tolerant configurations across EC2 regions and availability zones.
12/7/2012 SoftNAS™ Launched to Early Access Program Customers
The Beta version of SoftNAS is now available to EAP customers for deployment and use on VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon EC2 worldwide. This release contains numerous enhancements, fixes and has proven to be stable and robust. We highly-recommend existing EAP users download and install the new version. The installation documentation contains a simple process for migrating existing storage pools, volumes and data disks to the new release.
11/20/2012 SoftNAS™ Forums Launched
SoftNAS Forums is now online. Find information on recently-added SoftNAS features and related discussions.
Please join us at the forums – it’s free to join and participate!
