This article describes Alibaba Cloud’s Network Attached Storage (NAS) service.
Alibaba Cloud offers a distributed file system service with unlimited capacity and performance scaling to avoid the constraints of traditional file servers. In this article, we will learn more about the Alibaba Cloud’s Network Attached Storage (NAS) Service.
What Is Alibaba Cloud’s Network Attached Storage (NAS)?
Alibaba Cloud Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a reliable service that provides standard file access protocols, guarantees high throughput and low latency. It provides simple, scalable, and shared file storage for compute nodes including Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, E-HPC nodes, and Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) nodes. NAS service is known as [Apsara File Storage NAS](https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/nas) and it can allow simultaneous access to a file system from multiple ECS instances. NAS is compatible with multiple standard protocols, such as NFS and SMB. Apsara File Storage NAS also supports many functions.
Resource Access Management (RAM) Support
Apsara File Storage NAS supports the Resource Access Management (RAM) service to grant console access permissions to sub-users. RAM allows you to create and manage multiple RAM users within an Alibaba Cloud account.
Data Encryption
Apsara File Storage NAS offers data encryption by two methods:
- Data encryption at rest which is useful to protect data confidentiality, and maintain control of data without the need to build, or maintain your own key management infrastructure. It uses an encryption function integrated with [Alibaba Cloud KMS](https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/kms) to protect sensitive data assets
- Data encryption in transit via NFS that can mount file systems by using an NFS client through the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. The NFS client is useful as it can provide logs to allow troubleshooting of mount issues.
High Availability
Apsara File Storage NAS stores the data within a specific zone that is automatically replicated to prevent single point of failure (SPOF) risks. This is to ensure 99.9% availability with an SLA guaranteed to reduce maintenance costs and data loss risks.
Access Control
NAS provides VPC-based isolation and security group-based access control to ensure data security. This allows users to create mount targets within VPC or classic networks and allows ECS instances within the same VPC or under the same account to access the file system. Thus you can add rules to a permission group, allowing access to a file system from specific IP addresses or IP segments.
Storage Types
Apsara File Storage NAS offers 3 types of storage:
- General-purpose NAS file systems used to store hot data that is frequently accessed
- IA storage media that offers a lifecycle management feature to dump the data to an Infrequent Access (IA) storage medium to reduce costs
- Extreme NAS file systems for high-performance file sharing service based on the latest network architecture and all-flash storage
Advantages
NAS provides multiple benefits, such as:
- Low costs
- Ease of use and with a few clicks, you can make your operations
- Compatibility with multiple standard protocols
- High Performance with performance scales linearly with capacity
- High reliability offering multiple data replicas and data reliability of 99.999999999%
Why Using Alibaba Cloud’s NAS?
NAS allows you to mount file systems on various compute nodes across VPCs or regions. This can be done after you enable communication between different virtual private clouds (VPCs) and regions. You can use this service for the flexibility that it offers.
Conlusion
Alibaba Cloud NAS service offers data encryption supported for all available cloud disk products (basic disks, ultra disks, standard SSD disks, and Enhanced SSD disks) and shared block storage products.
