SoftNAS - High Performance NFS/CIFS/iSCSI Cloud NAS
Buurst | SoftNAS 5.5.0Linux/Unix, Other 8.5 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
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Easy to use but disappointing S3 Cloud Drives
We have been looking for an easy-to-use NAS-in-the-cloud option for a while and came across this offering from SoftNAS. The set up was simple and there's plenty of documentation to get started. The GUI interface is a bit dated (to me) but functional. However, I did have some problems adjusting the share permissions via the GUI. I eventually figured it out.
Biggest disappointment was the unreliability of the S3 cloud volumes. Being able to use the AWS S3 buckets as a block storage device in a NAS is definitely appealing. Adding the volumes via the GUI was simple enough and creating the storage pools and volumes was easy. However, I found that over a short period of time, the storage pool would go amber and upon closer investigation, one or more of the S3 Cloud drives are missing. Depending on the raid implementation, this could degrade the storage pool at best or render it useless at worst. The S3 buckets themselves appear to be fine - just SoftNAS has trouble seeing them.
Am experimenting a bit more but had to resort to using the more traditional (and reliable but more expensive) EBS volumes instead.
Disappointed for sure.
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Easy to use and intuitive, very well documented
Was up and running in no time. Very well documented solution. Didn't get as high performance numbers as expected but was able to average ~15MB/s when copying a 4GB file to the device.
Very viable NAS in the cloud
Set up was easy but I found that the storage pool was forever reporting back that it was degraded. I also lost the storage pool at least twice when I was fiddling with hot spares etc. Removing all the drives and starting again seemed to have fixed it. Hence a deduction of one star.
The creation of the shared drives <NFS and CFS> is a bit fiddly via the GUI and in my view, the GUI and workflow needs a refresh. It feels quite dated. Hence a deduction of another star.
However, the negative points aside, we will be using softNAS as it is price competitive and quick to set-up (despite the problems experienced) - we haven't put any of our production systems to it but will put softNAS into our stage/pre-prod. If anyone is looking for a NAS in the cloud, softNAS is definitely a viable option.