SoftNAS for EC2 is a virtual cloud storage appliance, providing trusted, commercial-grade NAS capabilities for EC2 cloud business computing workloads.  EC2 workloads include web servers, SaaS applications, SQL database servers, Exchange servers, Windows Remote Desktop Servers, Citrix XenApp servers, etc.  SoftNAS for EC2 provides the flexible, full-featured storage capabilities for trusted cloud computing applications.

 

SoftNAS for EC2 leverage flexible Elastic IP addresses, making it fast and easy to fail over across availability zones and regions (i.e., different data centers).  It's also straightforward to quickly replicate a SoftNAS cloud instance from one availability zone to other geographic regions, so that data is always available and performs well for geographically local users and communities.

 

And because SoftNAS for EC2 uses Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for raw data storage, backup and restore operations are fast and easy using EBS Volume Snapshots to Amazon's affordable, redundant S3 storage.

 

The Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment, which will be referred to simply as EC2 hereinafter, is a robust, powerful virtualization and computing system with many options and capabilities.  For our purposes here, we will focus on installing SoftNAS™ and configuring it for basic use.  Additional options exist for increasing performance and throughput, for database and other more demanding applications, which will also be covered briefly.

 

This section provides concepts that may be helpful for the first-time Amazon EC2 customers along with useful guidelines for making decisions about how to configure SoftNAS for best results in the EC2 computing environment.

 

 

Amazon AWS Product and Installation Options

 

SoftNAS provides three applicable products for Amazon AWS environments:

 

 

 

Product	Storage	Launch	Purchase	License	Configuration Tasks
SoftNAS Cloud Express	1 TB	AWS Marketplace, or AWS Console	on-demand hourly product*	Built-in License via AWS Marketplace	See section Launch on AWS Marketplace   Configuring a New SoftNAS Instance on EC2.
SoftNAS Cloud Standard	20 TB	AWS Marketplace, or AWS Console	on-demand hourly product*	Built-in License via AWS Marketplace	See section Launch on AWS Marketplace   Configuring a New SoftNAS Instance on EC2.
SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise	16 PB	AWS Marketplace, or AWS Console	on-demand hourly product*	Built-in License via AWS Marketplace	See section Launch on AWS Marketplace   Configuring a New SoftNAS Instance on EC2.

 

* SoftNAS SNAP HA includ

 

For more information, refer to the following sections.