In this week’s podcast episode, Eric Olson, Vice President of Cloud Solutions Architects, Buurst, will discuss how SoftNAS, one of Buurst’s cloud storage solutions, can help improve performance, availability, and cost control for their customers.
Julia Warnock: Hello everyone. This is Julia Warnock with the Buurst team at Carahsoft. And I would like to welcome you to our AWS federal podcast series. High Performance cloud storage with Buurst SoftNAS. I'm here with Eric Olson, Vice President of cloud solution architects at Buurst to talk about how SoftNAS one of Buurst’s cloud storage solutions can help improve performance, availability, and cost control for their customers. Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, you're welcome, Julia. I'm happy to be here. And I look forward to great, I have some questions to ask you. So we will jump right in here. I'll start with the first question who is Buurst?
Eric Olson: Buurst is a data performance company. We've been around since 2013. Previously, the company up until last year was actually called SoftNAS after our product. But now that we've morphed into a two product company, by adding fusion, we went ahead and change the name to Buurst. And that's with to use. And we've been around since 2013. With our NAS based product, and as of the end of 2020, we introduced our edge data pipeline product fusion into the market as well.
Julia Warnock: Very nice. So you said 2020, it sounds like you all are a pretty new company.
Eric Olson: Well, we've actually been around since 2013. Right with our product, we changed the name of the company in 2020. And then we introduced a second a second product, which is fusion, but our flagship SoftNAS product has actually been available to customers on the AWS Marketplace since 2013. It was actually one of the very first storage products that was actually available on the AWS Marketplace. I remember those days quite well.
Julia Warnock: Very nice. You guys have been around for a while. That is great.
Eric Olson: Yeah, we've been around for almost nine years now. And I've actually been with the company that long myself. I was the third employee brought on board at SoftNAS, at the time, now Buurst.
Julia Warnock: Wow, very nice. You're clearly an expert. So what is SoftNAS, and how does it help customers?
Eric Olson: So SoftNAS is a virtual storage appliance that's available off of the AWS Marketplace. And the way that it works is essentially you launch the software off of the marketplace. And then you have the ability to attach on AWS native Cloud Storage. So think of EBS devices, and all of the different flavors underneath of them. Like you know, SSDs, our HD DVDs, you know, they've now introduced GP three versus GP two. Um, so any of those discs can then actually be attached to SoftNAS. And we then manage all of that storage. So you can take multiple devices and put them inside of a raid zero to increase the performance. We also offer a high availability solution that's actually patented. It's a cross zone high availability solution. So you can actually have, you know, up to five nines of reliability. So any customers that have the need for high performance applications that maybe they can't get from any of the native services like Fs or NSX. Or if availability and reliability is important to them, then we find that SoftNAS is generally a good fit for those types of customers. Very cool. And I'm curious the security come into play here. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So SoftNAS, we have the ability to encrypt the data. So if you know in disk encryption, or encryption of the actual data at rest is important. That is a feature that's available, as well as any data that may be in flight is also encrypted as well. And the product is available, you know, on obviously, the Gulf cloud as well. So we've passed, you know, a lot of those security screenings that are out there.
Julia Warnock: Hey, cool. How does SoftNAS work with the AWS storage solutions?
Eric Olson: Yeah, so actually, SoftNAS is very tightly integrated with AWS, not only with the storage solutions, but with the platform itself. So the product was actually born in the cloud. So we leverage the underlying blocks storage devices that are available, right, and there's many of them that are out there, depending upon the performance you're looking for. So those disks get attached to the SoftNAS, we create a storage pool out of it, and then allow that to be shared out via, you know, NFS for Linux, servers, or SMB or sifts for Windows servers. And then one of the unique capabilities that SoftNAS offers that we also do provide I scuzzy in the cloud as well, for customers that need that. And that really only makes up a small percentage of our use cases. The primary is around, you know, SMB and NFS access for high performing application requirements.
Julia Warnock: So what are some of the most popular use cases?
Eric Olson: Sure, I'd be happy to tell you about that. So the first most popular and where we get the most, you know, leverage with the solution is for anybody that has mission critical use cases, okay? So that can, they can never be down. And these are customers that we find that even when it's time to, you know, do something like applying a software update, it's, you know, a big, big challenge for them, because they really just can never go down. So they like SoftNAS, because of our snap h a feature where, you know, they have the ability to failover should something you know, unexpected to happen, you know, like a zone outage inside of Amazon, or you know, like an underlying hardware failure of the disks, then they have the ability to automatically failover to an alternative availability zone. And that gives them that ability for any mission critical application, to have that availability. And then the second real big thing is for anybody that is on performance sensitive. So we have customers that, you know, have SaaS based applications that are generate revenue for the organization, or they're, you know, like I mentioned previously mission critical to the actual operational arm of the organization. And so there's alternative solutions for storage, however, you won't find any of them that provide the level of performance combined with the availability that SoftNAS offers currently today, available on AWS.
Julia Warnock: Okay, yeah. So it sounds like you can use this solution, basically, at any time anywhere.
Eric Olson: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's available on in all the regions on AWS, you can just go in and find the Carahsoft version of the Buurst SoftNAS products, okay, and launch it, and attach some disks, and, you know, you're basically up and running. And so, you know, any anybody that you know, needs to use it in, you know, the East region or, you know, overseas somewhere, it's available. It's been in the marketplace, as I mentioned, for, you know, nearly nine years, and it's a tried and trued. And very proven solution for, you know, a multitude of use cases. And I just highlighted really for you just a couple of those that were that were there.
Julia Warnock: Great. So what are some of the cost benefits of soft mass?
Eric Olson: Yeah, so at SoftNAS, one of the things that we realized with a product is that if you're looking for a storage solution, you're already paying for the storage, right? You're paying amazon for the underlying block devices. And a lot of storage solutions out there, they charge what we at first, when term of storage tax, you're double paying for the storage, because you have to pay for the capacity. Well, at Buurst, we decided to eliminate the storage tax. So with a SoftNAS product, you pay for the performance tier that you're looking for. Okay, so if you need, you know, a high level of performance, you go to the high performance tier, and you pay for that level of performance. And the capacity is really unlimited. At that point. We don't charge for capacity. Now on the vice versa. If you have, you know, not super high performance requirements, but you have a lot of data, you just go to a lower tier of performance, and whether you have, you know, one terabyte of data, or 100 terabytes worth of data, you pay for the performance, not the amount of data that's there. But in addition to that, by default, all volumes created by SoftNAS have compression enabled on them. So we're able to, you know, reduce the overall footprint of underlying cloud storage that's required. So that you know, in an addition to no storage tax helps reduce the overall total cost of ownership of the solution versus you know what the alternative may be?
Julia Warnock: And how does the number of users come into play with the cost of the solution?
Eric Olson: There is no user license. So the you can connect as many users as you want. And you can connect as much capacity as you want. You just pay for the performance tier that you're looking for based upon how much throughput on how many IOps, or input output operations per second, you would be looking for, which are the common measures for assessing overall storage performance.
Julia Warnock: Thank you again for your time and all the insights today, Eric, we really appreciate it.
Eric Olson: Oh, no problem, Julia. I appreciate you guys having me today. I've had a lot of fun with you. And I would love to come back. And hopefully maybe one day we can talk about our other product offering from Buurst, which is fusion, our edge data pipeline. It's a pretty cool, cool product. It has a lot of functions and you know would make for a great discussion.
Julia Warnock: Absolutely. For more information about Buurst and their products, download the case study on the podcast landing page. And for additional resources and information, visit the Buurst website linked on the landing page as well. Also contact us anytime at Buurst@carahsoft.com. Thank you and see you next time.