Availability of SoftNAS for Service Providers

SoftNAS, LLC announced the availability of SoftNAS for Service Providers, a multi-tenant NAS for service providers.

SoftNAS for Service Providers delivers full NAS functionality, security and performance while enabling the use of inexpensive iSCSI and object storage to lower overall storage costs. Through consumption-based, metered licensing service providers pay only for storage used.

According to an Enterprise Strategy Group report authored by Scott Sinclair, enterprises are concerned over data growth and those concerns increase exponentially with the amount of capacity they have to manage ⁽¹⁾. Service providers partner with SoftNAS to create predictable solutions for their enterprise customers.

SoftNAS for Service Providers is software-based and IT infrastructure independent, making it an solution for service providers responsible for customer data. Service providers can leverage investments in block and object storage by using it to provide file services for use cases including backup and archival storage, off-site replication, cross datacenter replication, BC and DR, office productivity, collaboration file sharing, and media hosting and distribution.

“Object and block storage are quickly evolving to become the de facto storage technologies because they lower storage costs for growing data volumes. With SoftNAS for Service Providers, organizations get file services and lower overall storage costs, which improves service provider margins,” commented Rick Braddy, CEO and CTO, SoftNAS. “We create opportunities for the service provider community to expand their services and support more end customers’ high-performance storage.“

The company delivers the full set of traditional NAS features, including compression and de-duplication, storage snapshots and writable clones, and thin-provisioning, enabling service providers to optimize their infrastructure for customers who share pools of common storage. By enabling these features on less expensive block or object storage, service providers get the best of both worlds.

Service providers can deploy the product as a dedicated virtual NAS appliance for specific customers or as a multi-tenant appliance shared across many customers. The company delivers Files-as-a-Service atop deep commodity storage whereby customers are charged only for actual storage capacity used. Because it is hardware independent, the solution can run in any virtualized datacenter and on commodity hardware to reduce capital expenditures on proprietary storage hardware. It is platform neutral and works with any S3-compatible object storage provider, iSCSI SAN and direct-attached SSD, SAS, SATA spinning disks.

Compared to legacy storage options, company’s solution is quick to deploy for rapid time to value. SoftNAS for Service Providers leverages low-cost commodity SSD and RAM caching to deliver maximum IO/s and throughput. It supports object storage providers such as NetApp, Hitachi, Cloudian and white box storage. Because it works in any virtualized IT environment, it helps control costs and maximize the value delivered to its customers.

Pricing begins at $.06 per gigabyte per month, with volume discounts for service providers.

⁽¹⁾ Enterprise Strategy Group, Object Storage Report, Scott Sinclair, June 2015.