This section provides an overview of SNAP HA™ architecture and provides design principles to apply when planning HA implementation. Softnas cloud offers two approaches to extending a common IP across AZs. Virtual IPs provided the capabiltiy through routing, and permit fully private VPCs. Virtual IPs are SoftNAS' best practice recommendation, as they ensure none of your IP addresses are public-facing, improving the security of your deployment.
Alternatively, Elastic IPs are the legacy solution, and were previously the only supported cross-zone routable IP addresses available in the AWS VPC environment. In practice, EIPs add very little latency or other overhead to storage traffic, and provide routing redundancy across the zones.
SoftNAS SNAP HA™ takes a basic EC2 elastic IP and layers on additional patent-pending functionality that turns it into an Elastic HA IP - a cross-zone IP suitable for highly-available network-attached storage. Both solutions are fully supported and can be implemented using the information below.