In case of Amazon EC2, EBS Volumes may be added as data disks to the SoftNAS Cloud® instance and in case of VMware vSphere, data disks may be added to the SoftNAS Cloud® VM. All applicable disks have been partitioned by this point, so it is time to set up a storage pool.
Storage pools are used to aggregate disk storage into a large pool of storage that can be conveniently allocated and shared by volumes.
Storage Pools for Amazon EC2-Based SoftNAS Cloud® Instance
In the following example, there are two storage pools designed for Amazon EC2 based SoftNAS Cloud® instance. The Storage Pool 1 is a high-performance pool with SAS disks arranged in a RAID configuration. The Storage Pool 2 is a high-capacity pool with SATA disks arranged in a RAID configuration. Design any kind of storage pool or RAID configuration to best fit the local environment. But these two are the most recommended type of storage pools.
The EBS volumes can be conveniently backed up to Amazon S3 redundant storage using EBS Volume Snapshot functionality, which is built into Amazon Web Services.
Storage Pools for VMware vSphere Based SoftNAS Cloud® VM
In the following example, there are two storage pools designed for VMware vSphere based SoftNAS Cloud® VM. The Storage Pool 1 is a high-performance pool with SAS disks arranged in a RAID configuration. It is supplemented with two SSD devices - one for read cache and other for write log SSD. The Storage Pool 2 is a high-capacity pool with SATA disks arranged in a RAID configuration.It is also supplemented with two SSDs. Design any kind of storage pool or RAID configuration desired, but these two are the most recommended type of storage pools.
The SSDs are optional, but they provide an enormous boost in read/write performance and have the ability to absorb spikes in I/O (each SSD can handle 20K to 40K IOPS).