What Is Cloud NAS?

What Is Cloud NAS?

Cloud NAS (Network-Attached Storage) is shared file storage — reachable over NFS, SMB or S3 — that runs in a public cloud instead of on a physical appliance in a data center or office. It works the way any NAS does: a server (or cluster of servers) exports a shared filesystem that many clients mount at once, for home directories, application data, media, or machine learning datasets. The difference is where the capacity actually lives. A traditional NAS keeps data on local disks or a SAN behind it; a cloud NAS keeps the bulk of its data in object storage — Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage — and layers NFS, SMB and S3 access on top of it.

That object-storage foundation is what makes cloud NAS attractive: capacity grows and shrinks with object pricing instead of pre-provisioned disk, there's no RAID array to size in advance, and the data is already sitting in the same storage tier your cloud's other services read from.

Why Teams Are Moving NAS to the Cloud

Three forces are driving the shift from on-premises NAS to cloud NAS:

• Unpredictable growth. Training datasets, checkpoints and media libraries grow faster than a fixed-capacity array can be sized for, and buying ahead of need wastes budget.
• Multi-cloud and hybrid deployments. Workloads increasingly need the same file access pattern on more than one cloud, or alongside an on-prem cluster, without re-architecting storage per environment.
• Operational simplicity. Object storage is managed by the cloud provider — durability, scaling and regional replication come built in, which removes array-level hardware operations from the team's plate.

How MayaNAS Implements Cloud NAS

MayaNAS is ZettaLane's cloud NAS: an active-active HA pair that exports NFS v3/v4.1, SMB 3 (with Active Directory) and S3 access to the same files, while capacity sits in your own object storage account rather than a pre-sized disk pool. It deploys directly from the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Marketplaces into your own subscription, and is billed through the cloud agreement you already have. For workloads that need a parallel filesystem rather than standard NAS protocols — GPU training and checkpointing at scale — the same engine is also available as Lustre on object storage.