Re: HA storage with automatic failover across availability zones in AWS?

[Tranter Cline]

SoftNAS provides out of the box HA across availability zones on AWS with automatic failover. SoftNAS uses block replication and ZFS, so it scales to hundreds of millions of files.

File replication technologies like GlusterFS have well-known limits on scalability, in terms of hundreds of thousands of files, after which everything slows down to a crawl. Also, write speeds on Gluster are slow, due to replication and synchronous waits for all nodes to complete. If you have more than a few hundred thousand files, best to go with an HA ZFS solution with block replication and avoid file replication, as it will not scale, which is sort of ironic, given that Gluster’s whole reason for existence was intended to be “scale out” storage – I guess someone forgot to mention that scaling up matters, too, not just scaling out.

On AWS, a native HA file server that works across zones with EBS and S3 storage is SoftNAS Cloud.