AWS re:Invent 2013
AWS re:Invent was an astounding event. The sheer pace and excitement of innovation of AWS, its ecosystem, and cloud enablement excitement, were truly inspiring. At AWS re:Invent , I joined Craig Carl – Partner Solution Architect at AWS, in a joint session on NFS and CIFS Options for AWS.
NFS and CIFS NAS options in AWS
Zadara Storage is currently the only true NAS as-a-service solution at AWS. NFS and CIFS are not natively supported by AWS, and although there are various possibilities to achieve NFS and CIFS support, most solutions require a complicated software stack that necessitates user-management, additional licenses, and compromised availability (Our CEO Nelson Nahum compared the use of GlusterFS and Zadara NAS at AWS in this blog post)
With Zadara, customers can mount our dedicated storage directly to EC2 instances, using Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA™) technology. VPSA looks, performs and behaves like an Enterprise NAS appliance—with an NFS / CIFS server, dual HA controllers, dedicated high performance drives and Enterprise class NAS features—but is offered as a service.
Let’s take a look at some of the VPSA prominent features, as featured in the NFS and CIFS options on AWS presentation at re:Invent (Slide no. 25-34). You can view the entire presentation at the end of this post.
Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA™) Service:
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Zadara Storage delivers Private enterprise-grade Storage-as-a-Service for AWS customers. Our VPSA service is billed hourly, with no commitment or extra AMIs (instances) needed.
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VPSA enjoys very low-latency, averaging 1~2ms attach to AWS instances, and is available at AWS locations around the globe including the US East, US West, Europe, and Japan regions.
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VPSA is a NAS and SAN in the cloud solution with unified storage that natively supports both File (NFS and CIFS) and Block (iSCSI) type storage.
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Our solution can ensure dedicated resources for every user, with a ridiculously high QoS, and with tunable and controllable performance.
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VPSA delivers true HA with not a single point of failure, and is backed by a 100% SLA.
AWS Direct Connect
Zadara Storage is attached to EC2 via AWS Direct Connect. By using colocation facilities such as Equinix, KVH, eircom and CoreSite (TBA), our VPSA service enables replication and data management features across multiple AWS regions.
Easy Provisioning!
VPSA can be provisioned on the fly. Take a look at the image below of our provisioning interface which allows users to choose dedicated resources, the type and quantity of drives, throughput and IOPS (via Zadara Engine), and gives a clear overview of hourly costs:
Why Zadara VPSA in AWS?
Zadara Storage VPSA deliver unique enterprise-grade storage features, unequaled by any other service offering at AWS today, including:
- SSD read/write caching
- 100 TB+ volumes
- Shared volumes
- Low-impact snapshots
- NFS and CIFS
- Remote replication
- 5-minute RPO!
- High random write performance
- Write cache assisted
- Data-at-Rest Encryption
- Zero-capacity instant cloning, e.g. for test/dev
- 100s of volumes
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Our latest VPSA Enterprise Suite features enable advanced data management features (including snapshots, zero-capacity clones and remote replication) to help customers best protect their data across clouds, zones or regions, with a recovery point objective (RPO) of only 5 minutes.
Protect
• Low-impact snapshots, available immediately
• Snapshot based, latency-tolerant Remote Replication for multi-region Disaster Recovery
Recover
• Instant, zero-capacity cloning of snapshots
• RPO: 5 minutes
AWS customer use case:
iG is a Brazilian online service provider and internet service provider, and is the largest Internet portal in Brazil.
iG is a VPSA customer at AWS; their current deployment includes:
• 5 TB of NFS Volumes
• Shared by 170 instances
• Connected to a single VPSA
To learn more about Zadara Storage File and NAS support, visit our cloud NAS solution page.
If you’d like to try our VPSA service at AWS, you can register for a free trial and begin testing the full service immediately: Get started now
