Alibaba Cloud Network Attached Storage Now Available

Alibaba Cloud users can now enjoy simple, scalable, and reliable network attached storage for use with ECS instances, HPC, and Alibaba Cloud Container Service.

Available currently in Singapore and Mainland China regions, Network Attached Storage (NAS) provides standard file access protocols, so you do not have to modify existing applications. This enables you to have a distributed file system with unlimited capacity and performance scaling, a single namespace, multi-party sharing, high reliability, and high availability.

Product Features

The product is a distributed file system, enabling file systems to grow elastically to 10 petabyte-scale and support thousands of clients to access data from ECS or Container Service instances. The distributed architecture avoids the bottlenecks and constraints inherent with traditional file servers.

Multi-threaded applications benefit from the distributed architecture design, which grants data access from multiple ECS or Container Service instances to aggregate throughput and IOPS. In addition, NAS can be mounted to ECS or Container Service instances dynamically via Auto Scaling on-demand.

Advantages

Alibaba Cloud NAS can be seamlessly integrated with other Alibaba Cloud products and has many advantages over a self-built NAS on the cloud and conventional NAS products, including:
⁃ No Single-Point-Of-Failure
⁃ 99.99999999% data reliability
⁃ Elastically scalable storage capacity
⁃ Horizontally scalable throughput capacity
⁃ End-to-end permission management

Pricing

Alibaba Cloud NAS supports both Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription storage packages and charges fees based on the total volume of storage used each month, without any other costs. This means no minimum fee, no set-up charges and no charges for bandwidth or requests.

Common Scenarios

Server Log Sharing

Store app server logs on multiple ECS instances on the shared NAS to facilitate concentrated processing and analysis of logs in the future.

Highly Available Load Balancing Servers

Store data on the shared NAS to achieve high availability of the load balancing servers in scenarios where the Server Load Balancer is connected to multiple ECS instances.

Enterprise Office File Sharing

For enterprise employees that need to visit and share the same datasets for working purposes, the administrator can create a NAS file system for individuals in the organization to access certain data. The administrator can also set file- or directory-level user and user group permissions.

Using Alibaba Cloud NAS Via Management Console

You can create, modify and monitor NAS file systems from the Alibaba Cloud Management Console. This provides a simple web-based user interface which allows you to access and configure NAS.

For step-by-step directions on how to deploy Alibaba Cloud NAS through the Management Console, please read this Quick Start Guide.

Accessing Alibaba Cloud Documentation

To use and better understand Alibaba Cloud NAS, please read the product's Documentation, including how to deploy and design scalable file storage using NAS.

For more details about Alibaba Cloud NAS and purchasing information, please see the NAS product page.