Nasuni Reviews

We have one parent file system connected to three Nasuni systems. One is in the APAC region, and two are located in the US. The file system is connected across all three locations so that people can access the file system anywhere in the network. 

It's connected to object storage in the background, and we have some capacity there. We have a license of up to 500 TB that we manage, including all the data required for archiving or anything. We use it to create a backup pool in our cloud object storage and only use it for full backup.

We use Nasuni for daily activities. For example, some file shares have assigned tools and servers. People use it to create some requests for data recovery when data on the server is lost. The user asks us to create a new location from Nasuni. We also have some patches that must be updated on the cloud each month, and I'll use Nasuni to monitor any issues. 

Nasuni enabled us to eliminate on-premise infrastructure. This is an important benefit everyone should know about. If you have some kind of VDI environment, people don't want to lose access. Once you have this availability option, it makes your data access seamless if there are any outages.  

We like Nasuni's snapshot technology. The snapshot and recovery features are the things we use most frequently. Ideally, I would recommend NFS or CFS, which gives you more benefits for clients or anyone who wants to access FTP protocol, FTP utilities, SAN, and MSS.

The visibility Nasuni provides is top-notch. When there is an issue in the environment, and you open a ticket, they immediately come into the picture and help you find the solution.

Nasuni's data protection is crucial for our organization. All of the file systems we manage are protected. We're protected if users accidentally delete files or move data from one file system to another. We can recover the data using the snapshot functionality.

You can see whether your data is protected from the console. From there, you can view the missing data and recover it. Every device is visible in a centralized monitoring tool we call the MMC console. It can discover all the nodes or the necessary systems that are managed in the environment.

It's a user-friendly tool with a beautiful graphical interface. Anyone can use the management interface. If you're a layperson who doesn't know how to use Nasuni, I would only need to teach you the fundamentals of NAS technology.

Some applications may not be suited for the Nasuni environment. You may need something with better performance. Otherwise, if you want to run daily operations or some file system, it's a good bet. 

I have worked with Nasuni for three years.

I rate Nasuni seven out of 10 for stability. Nasuni is a stable solution if you understand the environment, and you've properly designed your environment. 

We can expand file storage capacity on-demand and without limitations.

I'm in India, and our support comes from the US, so it's always a little bit difficult to engage Nasuni during non-business hours. I would recommend providing support during the working hours of other regions. 

I don't think we use Natsuni for VDI environments. We do have another environment that uses NetApp.

Setting up Nasuni is straightforward, but it can be complicated to connect it with the technology on the back end. Nasuni is built on the cloud, and there's an appliance on top of that. The initial setup only takes five to 10 minutes. The deployment of Natsuni is very simple. It involves creating a VM in the cloud, and you create a Nasuni image on top of that. In our case, the back end is an IBM product.

Nasuni is cost-effective. If you need something that delivers a lot of value for the cost, Nasuni is a good thing. 

I rate Nasuni seven out of 10. It isn't an ideal solution for all applications you have in your environment. If I'm an IT person, I do have a lot of other applications sitting in there, so I might need to adopt some other storage vendor for those. I might need to procure some other storage technology for other applications if I'm a business person, for example.

Nasuni is our file system. Our employees including, engineers, designers,  and accounting, store files on the system. And we have the on-prem filer, so the office folks can use File Explorer to browse the drive and retrieve or store files. 

Our remote users usually use VPN to access our files at our data center. At the data center we have one filer for the remote workers to access.

The data protection from Nasuni is extremely important. Back in December 2019, our company experienced a ransomware attack and pretty much all of our data got encrypted by the ransomware. Nasuni now provides backups and an easy-to-restore process in case of this type of disaster. We rely on the backups and restores tremendously. So far, we haven't had to use that feature, but Nasuni ensures that in the case of a ransomware or cybersecurity attack, they are able to restore all the data in the shortest amount of time.

We are trying to consolidate all our data platforms and toolsets with Nasuni as a single, global file system. It's just too difficult for IT to maintain various technologies and platforms. Nasuni serves as a single technology to give us more efficient processes and workflow. It's a good way to consolidate our technology. We're not there yet, where we have a complete view of all our data, but hopefully, in the next 12 to 18 months, we can get a 360-degree view of our users and increase productivity as well.

The continuous file versioning gives us peace of mind. In IT, we can sleep better at night knowing that Nasuni has backups. I actually just looked at the configuration recently because a VP was asking if our data was being backed up and, if yes, how often. It's being backed up daily and the frequency is every 15 minutes, on average. Every 15 minutes it takes a snapshot of our data. Throughout the day, there are plenty of snapshots to restore so that does give us peace of mind.

The feature I have found to be most valuable is the revision control of the files. If somebody deletes or accidentally makes a wrong change to files, we can go back to the revision history and restore the previous versions. That is a very good feature that we rely on. A minor file recovery, when we receive a help desk ticket from an employee claiming files are either missing or corrupted, usually takes less than 10 minutes.

We're able to provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on demand, and without limits. It provides the capacity we need now.

And Nasuni has built-in antivirus and anti-malware features, which we appreciate a lot. Although we have an endpoint security antivirus solution, you cannot be too careful. Another layer of security is really appreciated. We rely on that, and Nasuni constantly sends out alerts when it detects suspicious files on the system for us to clean up. That is a very good feature.

It's also quite easy for IT to manage. It's a very feature-rich platform. However, it is not too difficult to administer compared to other platforms that we have used in the past. Even when there is a new person in IT, when we train them on how to handle Nasuni and use its features. It's not too difficult.

We explored the Access Anywhere option because we need that type of feature for our international users, but the additional costs put us off. And to my knowledge, deploying Access Anywhere is not as easy and straightforward as we would like because you still have to deploy a physical or virtual filer to each site. Either way, you still need another layer, the filer, to enable Access Anywhere.

We have multiple offices and Nasuni replicates the changes pretty fast. When users from one office save their changes, their peers in another office can see the changes within minutes. Of course, this is an area for constant improvement and we hope that they can still reduce the amount of time it takes to replicate changes. The minimal wait time used to be much longer but they have improved it. They implemented something called Global File Acceleration that accelerated the replication and we appreciate that a lot.

Replication depends on a lot of factors, such as a site's internet speed, bandwidth, and congestion on the network. However, we hope the Nasuni team continues to strive for faster replication and makes it more efficient.

Another issue is that you can configure each filer to have web access. This is different from the Access Anywhere feature. You can create a web portal for a filer where a user can log in using their Active Directory credentials. We would like to enable multi-factor authentication for this type of web access to the filer. Relying only on Active Directory credentials is still not safe enough. We are using Duo multi-factor authentication and we would like to see Nasuni integrate with Duo so that we can further secure the access. To my knowledge, although I could be wrong, they don't have that yet.

In addition, Nasuni relies on a reseller, a middle-man. Our reseller is a company called SHI, and I am not happy with SHI's performance. I expressed this to our Nasuni account manager. I told him that every time we want to order a Nasuni filer, we have to go through SHI, but the performance has just not been competent and our point of contact has not been knowledgeable. Often, things have not been handled properly. SHI, on a scale of one to 10, with one being the lowest, would be about a 2 or 2.5. It fails miserably. The purchasing process, the shipping of new equipment, has actually wasted a lot of time and the inefficiency and delays all cost money. Nothing is wrong on the Nasuni side, rather it's all because of the reseller.

I have been using Nasuni for almost four years.

The reliability, compared to the past three platforms we have used, is very good.  It is the most robust solution we have used, by far. It is very stable and definitely an enterprise-level solution.

We have about 450 users of Nasuni and our company is growing. If we open new office space, we will definitely consider adding an on-premises Nasuni filer, depending on how big the office is.

Nasuni's support is excellent and our account manager is great. If any ticket sits there for too long or I do not get the answer I am looking for, all I need to do is talk to our account manager. He will help escalate the ticket or he will locate an engineer to speak with me or our IT staff directly to get a clear answer. I would give their support team a very high score.

Positive

All our data on Nasuni is in the cloud, on AWS, but we do have an on-prem cache called filer.

Setting it up is not too difficult. It did not take that long. From zero to go-live with the Nasuni file system took around 60 days. 

In terms of our cloud migration process, back in 2019, right after the ransomware attack, we salvaged as much good data as possible and put it on Nasuni. The cloud migration took a good five business days to fully migrate any good data that wasn't encrypted to the Nasuni AWS cloud.

We don't have a big IT team but maintaining Nasuni does not take a whole lot of resources.

It was just our It team working with the Nasuni engineers. And fast forward to now, every time we want to add an additional Nasuni cache filer, it's done in-house, and it takes between four and eight hours of work.

We definitely have a very good ROI.

The pricing is fair. It's an enterprise-level solution so it's not inexpensive. But when we grew to a certain level, we could no longer rely on what we call "mom and pop solutions", like Synology. For a small business that is just getting started and needs a file system, Synology is great. It's very affordable. But when you grow to a certain size, it can no longer handle the demand. Nasuni is one level up from that.

It also simplifies things, in terms of cash flow, if we want to expand our Nasuni solution. Nasuni does include fixed assets in the form of the on-prem cache filers. They are basically Dell servers. But the solution is straightforward for our budget and cash flow.

The cost is pretty stable year over year. We allocated part of our annual budget to make sure we cover our Nasuni overhead costs. It's easy to forecast what it's going to be. 

Before we went with Nasuni, we tried three different products for file system replication: Synology, Global File System, and PeerGFS. They were not enterprise-level and did not work out. They each have their own problems that are too significant and led to a lot of business impact.

We have recently been exploring using SharePoint as our collaboration platform so that certain files would be stored on SharePoint. But I can still see Nasuni serving as our primary file system. While you can collaborate on the cloud, when a project is done you have to move the files to Nasuni for the security of the backups.

I would advise that if a company is similar in size to RRC, Nasuni is definitely worth considering. Whatever cloud solution you are heading toward, make sure it has the same type of security and backups that Nasuni provides. Anything less than that would be a step down from what we have today. I don't see a lot of economical cloud solutions out there that can rival the solid backup that Nasuni provides.

By default, Nasuni stores files either on Microsoft Azure or AWS. They allowed us to choose. We chose AWS because we are more familiar with it and because our company, RRC, also has a global workforce. We put it in the cloud so that our foreign workers could access the files. We have a big workforce in Asia and South America. We went with the cloud system to ensure that the access and performance were up to standard. We cannot afford any latency when our global workforce tries to use the file system.

We don't use the solution to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments. We tried VDI from different providers before, and it just did not work out. It mainly came down to two things. One was the cost per user, which was still a bit too high. At that time, it just didn't make sense for us. The second issue was that our engineers rely on AutoCAD, and when using VDI, the graphics in AutoCAD are not as smooth as when they are on a physical computer in front of them. The latency and lagging were a bit too much for our engineers.

In terms of reducing on-premises infrastructure, right now our workers are requesting to work from home more, so our offices have fewer workers coming in. The trend is that fewer and fewer of our users rely on the on-prem Nasuni cache filers. When they work from home, they have to dial in to our data center via VPN. In the next 12 to 24 months we may have a new set of worker dynamics and, at that time, the on-prem filer will have to be relocated to optimize access. But it's hard to predict what our workforce distribution will look like a year or two from now.

We have people in the field worldwide who go to various locations to gather data. After they gather the data, they need to upload it for our lab technicians and services to analyze. Somebody's out in a remote location, and they need to get that data back to the United States, but we can't send it via FTP to the local office. We need a system that can quickly offload the data to the technician and an automated way to deliver it to the branches. That's what Nasuni does for us.

Our company has 10 major locations, and the user count is about 150 at any given time. Nasuni users include data analysts, lab technicians, field technicians, and branch personnel administrators.

Nasuni enabled us to take data from on-premise data centers and put it in the cloud, so our technicians now have access from anywhere that is connected to our network. Everything was previously on legacy on-prem Windows Servers, and employees had to VPN into the network. You had to use standard network transfer systems. Nasuni allowed our entire operations group to become cloud-based.

Our strategy is to migrate everything we can to the cloud. Nasuni is tightly integrated with Azure, so we can seamlessly leverage infrastructure as a service up in the cloud.

We've replaced some of our on-premise infrastructure with Nasuni appliances, which has many benefits. We still have on-premises hardware, but they are Nasuni appliances built to operate in the company's technology.

Nasuni is a top-tier solution, and we pay a lot for it, so I don't know if it's necessarily helped cut our costs. It may have reduced some work for IT personnel. As an administrator, I can say that IT technicians would need to spend more time on standard maintenance tasks if we were working with a traditional solution. 

Adjusting the solution to our organizational processes has been effortless. It's seamless to roll out any update. It's only as difficult as we make it. For example, Nasuni allows us to automatically update all systems within the environment, and we only scale it back to the policy, so we can test those operations before they are implemented. Nasuni fully automates the process of updating to the latest and greatest features with minimal manual interference. 

Fortunately, we've never had a ransomware attack, but that could be because Nasuni has ransomware detection built into it. We have never had to recover from a ransomware attack on our Nasuni systems. Ransomware attacks on our traditional services were a nightmare to deal with, but we've never had that happen on our Nasuni infrastructure.

Nasuni's unified file system makes everything across the world appear as if it were in a single local directory for all users. Regardless of where an employee is, that data appears to an end-user as if it is sitting right there in their local office.
Nasuni's unified file system replaced one of our most critical operations, but not all of them. We still need to maintain software integration with legacy systems.

Nasuni offers a 360-degree view of our files to all global end-users by providing a single location where users can go. Nasuni technology allows us to operate without the delays associated with traditional systems. It provides unlimited on-demand storage capacity for our primary data centers and remote locations. This is mission-critical functionality.

Data protection is another crucial feature. We must protect field data that is uploaded to our data centers, and we rely on Nasuni's security pieces, including encryption and built-in malware detection. Our data must be encrypted, and we would face massive risks if the data were compromised.

Nasuni's continuous file versioning has been crucial on multiple occasions when files were accidentally deleted or when data was corrupted. The snapshot allows us to retrieve that data quickly. We can sit back and allow the Nasuni system to take care of our backups with no additional configuration on Azure or the infrastructure side. Nasuni provides all the essential pieces we need to utilize their service without having to implement any additional third-party products.

When users inadvertently delete or corrupt data, they can restore a previous version. With a few clicks, Nasuni enables us to do what would otherwise require significant effort with a traditional backup system. This feature reduced costs and effort because it's built into the system.

Nasuni could improve cloud integration and documentation of various ways we can leverage the product. It integrates with Azure, but the native Azure File Sync solution lets you divide data into tiers like hot, cool, and archived. Nasuni doesn't allow you to break the data apart into those tiered categories. 

That's helpful on the Azure side because you can control costs for data that isn't accessed frequently. Data classified as "cool" or "archived" costs less in Azure. The ability to separate that data within Nasuni would be an enhancement that allows customers to save money on Azure-based backend data storage.

We've used Nasuni since 2016.

We have never had a problem with Nasuni, and they have provided excellent support for any minor issues we've had. Most problems we've faced weren't Nasuni's fault. Any outages are typically due to failures in our network infrastructure or a local power outage. Nasuni can come back online as soon as the network connection is restored. 

I rate Nasuni support a 10 out of 10. Nasuni's support is helpful and they're always getting better. They provided solid support in the early days, but I think the product was also new for them. You could tell that some of their support engineers were still getting used to the product themselves. They work with you until the problem is resolved instead of just pointing to the documentation. 

Positive

We previously used legacy Windows File Servers and traditional network setups. That was a pain because we couldn't unify the directory structure, which is a core feature of Nasuni. We had legacy file servers out there in these branch offices and were using traditional file commands to exchange data between the various locations.

It's all automatic once everything is configured within the Nasuni environment. All the data is there. The fact that it comprises files hosted on the local filers means that you're not consuming the type of bandwidth you would be consuming with a Windows system. The difference is night and day. 

Setting up Nasuni was pretty straightforward with some help from Nasuni. There were some prerequisites, and we had to explain to various groups how to prepare. The product was new, so many people didn't understand how it worked. Don't try to go at it alone. It's best to get the Nasuni professional services team to help you implement it. 

The initial setup took a few days, but we spent several weeks migrating large amounts of data from our legacy systems. It took us longer because of limitations on bandwidth. Once the migration was started, it was just a matter of waiting for that data to transfer across.

We had help from Nasuni professional services. 

The ROI is a reduction of labor hours on the IT side. We spend less on maintenance, and our people in the field don't need to go to an office to upload their data. Nasuni allows the technician to do it from the field.

If you plan to implement Nasuni, you should consider your data retention requirements and the amount of data you will use. You need to know how much data will be stored under the Nasuni license and where that data will sit. For example, we have our data stored on the Azure cloud, and we have to pay Azure for that. We pay the license for Nasuni technology to access that data. You need to clearly understand that so you won't be surprised by what you might perceive as double billing.

It's essential also to understand the requirements at each location because there is a charge for outgoing data. For example, you will spend a lot more on a Nasuni appliance at a massive on-premise data center, but a smaller appliance may work for a branch office in a remote location. You can save lots of money on data costs for whichever cloud platform you use. 

Nasuni hardware appliances have a product life of seven years, so you must purchase a new filer if you want continued support. 

Another team in our group evaluated a competing product and ruled it out quickly because it didn't meet our requirements. Nasuni helped us set up a proof of concept in a demo environment, whereas the other vendor was unable to do that.

I rate Nasuni a 10 out of 10. It performs a critical function when we deal with customer data that must be analyzed quickly. Field staff can upload the data and disseminate it to other places for deep analysis. If Nasuni ever went down, alarm bells would go off throughout the company. That's how essential it is. 

I would recommend Nasuni because it's a proven product that has delivered results for us even in the worst-case scenario. If you're still using a traditional cloud solution like native Azure products, you are still susceptible to human error. Also, you would need to architect your backup and DR solutions, then integrate, maintain, and administer them.

Nasuni has built-in security, so we're not worried about hosting our data on it. If you regularly do massive file transfers between multiple locations, Nasuni has an advantage over its competitors. 

Unified, global file sharing while reducing costs and eliminating backups.

We had a Nasuni filer in our Texas office. But due to the cold in Texas, power was down for a couple of weeks due to the inability to get fuel for the generator.  The users outside the area could work from home but they could not get to their filer in their Texas office. Since Nasuni stores our files in the cloud, we just setup another filer in the cloud with access to their files and they were back in business.

The features most valuable are 

1: Nasuni storage is immutable and the ransomware protection that it provides.

2: Elimination of file storage cost through elimination of backups as well as deduplication and compression.

3: Excellent support - the Nasuni support team is always there when you need them.

4: Centralize management and reporting capabilities provided by the NMC.

5: Ability to leverage our AWS Marketplace discount.

6: User file restoration self service.

7: Global file locking providing the ability to share any file with others in the world with the same controls that a users would have on one file server.

8: Ease of performing updates through a centralized console.

I originally felt that a Dropbox type interface would be useful but after second thought with all of the new always-on vpn capabilities that are available, I've reconsidered and decided that's not an appropriate for this platform. 

I have been using the solution for about two years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

The filers are separate devices. Admins really don't have to log into them too often. There is a Nasuni Management Console, which can do most of the management work and perform all of the upgrades, which routinely come out. You don't have to worry about shutting things down. We alert users when updates are being deployed with plenty of notice and reminders and do them manually. We typically do the updates manually during non-working hours in each region, but you can also schedule the upgrades to install automatically. 

It's a solid solution, easy to maintain.

It is very scalable. The only thing that I was concerned about initially was the global file locking. Everyone who was opening a file, anywhere in the world, has to talk to that service component. This solution was very well designed, scalable and redundant.  We've had no performance or problems with it at all. 

Nasuni's file storage system is extremely scalable and we are not close to exceeding it's capabilities or scalability limits.

Properly sizing filers is the best way to provide good performance and Nasuni does have a spreadsheet-based tool to help in that regard.

Nasuni's integration with Varonis is another plus.  We have one filer setup to read all files in the system in the event the entire file system has to be rescanned, which occurs about once per year.  When it does, the users don't even know it's happening.

The technical support is excellent. The Nasuni team knows we rarely have issues  and that we are not as familiar with the service as they are.  They are good about it and help us through all problems, all of which have been related to issues on our side.  We have not had any problem related to the service itself. 

When the Dallas Tx are had a deep freeze, we were upset because we could not access the filer there with a projected restoration of at least 2 weeks.  Nasuni support indicated that we could just do a disaster recovery to make another filer, which we proceeded to do in the cloud.  It was that simple and guidance was much appreciated.

I would give the Nasuni sales and technical support teams a 10+ out of 10. I don't do that very often, but Nasuni has never failed us and they are very easy to deal with with a top quality service organization.

Positive

Our original solution was traditional file servers and backup systems located in each remote office which we migrate to regional data centers.  Access performance became an issue.

We wanted to go to a cloud based system and back then, I was sold on Dropbox. It was fast, clean and simple. But upon a closer look, I could see it was not an enterprise solution.  Then I came across Nasuni and they had what we needed with global file locking.  We tested it, it worked as advertised and we moved to Nasuni with local office filers, supplemented with virtual filers in our regional data centers.

An additional win involved eliminating most of our disk and tape storage for backups performed by our software development team in Australia.  Our engineers had terabytes worth of source files that they used to develop our product and we were purchasing backup media for them. Once we convinced them that Nasuni could do the job, and that the data was stored in AWS, we were able to eliminate all of the extra hardware, tapes and physical storage space for it. Deduplication worked wonders for this solution too.

The initial setups varied on a site by site basis.  Some had physical filers and others were VMware based.  Our Infra team was very familiar with all of the environments and worked well setting up the sites and doing the file migrations.

It was a combination of our Nasuni Sales and Solution Architect, Nasuni Professional Services and our internal Infrastructure team and consultants.

Most of the work was related to summarizing our storage usage at each remote office and in our data centers which was then used to determine the sizing of the Nasuni resources.  During that process sizing of the physical filers was also done, allowing for projected growth.  Although there were a lot of logistical details related to the infrastructure configurations at each of our sites, we were able to get the information needed.

However, by far most of the work was in migrating the files from the old file servers to the Nasuni filers and coordinating testing with the end users.

The Nasuni caching system, if it's properly configured, will not be touching the S3 storage in AWS very often. With S3, the way they configure it, the normal S3 stores all your data and you can access it at any time. Then, there is something called S3 IA for the infrequently accessed. AWS says that they give you a break, e.g., half the price, if you write your data once and don't touch it for something like six months or a year. By setting the caching up in the filers, you can reduce the amount of access you have to S3 and cut that cost by 50% too.

The overall cost of storage for Nasuni is much lower than to setup file server, especially in light of the fact that you don't have to back them up.  There are no charges for virtual Filers - you can install as many as you want.  

Virtual filer images come in various formats depending on the technology that you are hosting them on.  There are images for various cloud-based or in house infra service being used such a AWS, Google, VMware, etc.  

ROI is also accelerated backup systems, media, off site storage and transportation/shipping is all eliminated.

They could lower the cost, but it saves so much money when you go into it (by losing all the backup).  I believe getting the experts involved pays off in the long run.

There are two packages that you can buy, but we only got the first. The first package is how you set up Nasuni. It is mainly related to selecting which virtual image you want. This depends on what target you are running it on. We didn't really have a lot of problems with that, because we purchased most of our filers right from Nasuni. Therefore, they came preloaded. It was just a matter of receiving the filers and having them set up at the site. The second package is basically setting up the file server, the directories, and doing the migration.

With the appliances, we received five years worth of all service and maintenance. Basically, they give you a rack mount PC. They actually have one desk side if you want to put it in an office environment that has encrypted disks. They follow the Fed standard. Therefore, if someone steals a disk, they can't look at the data. Even if they take it out of a machine, they still can't get to your data. 

There are five or six different filer models. One of them is an office-based unit that sits under a desk. The rest of them are all 1U and 2U rack mount devices. They have it covered pretty well.

We tested it at my previous company. There are other companies who do the same thing that Nasuni does, but Nasuni is the only one with a single global file lock. They have spent a lot on making that fast and redundant.  The global file locking was a major difference and benefit for us.

The company and its technology are solid and their solution architects and support teams are EXCELLENT!!

A proper directory and file structure/organization design is important to allow auto-failover access redundancy.  Nasuni can explain how this can be done.

If I had to rate Nasuni, I would give Nasuni 10+ out of 10. The solution has been a lifesaver. 

We are a global media company and I look after eight Nasuni Filers for the UK and Ireland.

In the UK, every Nasuni appliance is stored locally in an office. They are stored in a standard comms room, and if that office went down for any reason, there are snapshots of the data made every hour that could be accessed.

A web version of the data can be available if there was a need due to an outage in a local office, so we can keep the business working.

With the mix of working from home and office, this is a good cloud solution for our company and we plan to use it as our standard file sharing platform going forward.

Our business is essentially split into two parts. We have a media element where they use standard office files such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Then, we have the creative division where they store things like high-end videos and Adobe files.

In the creative division, their file sizes are much bigger so we've seen the flexibility with having the on-premises device. For example, you can have a large caching device. Especially for our creative users, who are working on large creative files, they need that local speed access. They need something better than a standard USB drive, as well as something that can be backed up and is secure.

In general, it allows users in the business to access the data they need in a reliable fashion.

Nasuni has allowed us to replace multiple data silos and we are working toward having a single global file system. We shuttered one of our traditional on-premises data centers about 18 months ago, so we have this plan in the pipeline for the business. We know that Nasuni is our way to manage data effectively, where we can have cloud backups as well as the speed of a local appliance. Given how well it is working in our offices, they are now adopting it in other parts of the business, globally. The main drive for large data storage is going to be for Nasuni, going forward.

The need to have access to data 24 hours a day is very important for our business. We have teams and they sometimes work overnight or over a weekend. They may need to share data with colleagues in a different country or timezone, and that always-available service is quite important.

We do snapshots of our environment every hour, so if someone deletes a file and they're working on something with a deadline, we can revert back to something in a very recent version, in a short period of time. That element of the service has worked really well for us.

Nasuni has different sizes of appliances with different capacities that provide storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand. They take up very little room in our comms room rack. The biggest one that we have at the moment is 2U or 4U, so depending on the size of our office space and the amount of data storage, the range of different appliances that Nasuni has available gives us good options so we can pick and choose the most suitable solution for each office we have.

This is important to us because of the nature of our business. We regularly acquire companies, and normally, their data structure is not in line with our standards. Using Nasuni, we are able to take what they have and standardize it with a range of different hardware to fit our data storage platform.

For example, two of the units that we installed were for companies that we recently bought, and having them made the transition a lot easier than we thought it might be at first.

One of the ways that Nasuni has improved our organization is by providing access to centralized data. For example, we have a range of applications that have their own data repository. One of our teams that does a lot of data analytics needed access to our media-borne information. The need to expand that across other countries became apparent, probably about a year ago.

Some of our offices in Eastern Europe didn't have any storage capacity themselves, so we found giving them access to these file shares, just by giving them a web solution with access to this data, really helped them with the business of reaching the colleagues they needed to. It allows them to work in a seamless fashion, where they haven't been able to before. This has now expanded because it worked well for the needs they had.

Nasuni has simplified management compared to our previous processes. This is the product on the data storage side that really helped us cross the mix of hybrid cloud and on-premises devices. In the past, we had traditional servers in comms rooms and offices, or data centers and tape backups, so allowing us to have that on-site storage but with a cloud backup, and once it's configured, having to spend minimal time worrying about backups and how they worked, allowed us to cross that barrier to make our business more agile and help us simplify the support we provide.

In terms of continuous versioning, we have configured a hundred file versions, which is more than enough for our capacity. We also have hourly snapshots, which give us the ability to recover files quickly and easily. This is something that really assists us. That feature is used every week I imagine, certainly from our offices. The fact that they're an always-available and always-on service really helps us keep up with our business.

When we identify a security incident, we know a time we can go back to, where the data we have is clean. We're confident that we can do that. We have test servers so that if there's a need to restore separate environments, to check that data is uninfected, we have that option available. We have the ability to look at the file timestamps at a quick glance, and the fact that we are confident Nasuni will provide what we need is very important for our operations.

Continuous file versioning has a positive impact on our users. When they accidentally delete a file, all they have to do is tell us a file name and when they last had it, and we can find a version of that file within an hour of having that request. The nature of our business is that people want things immediately. Using Nasuni, we can service that request without having to restore from a tape backup. With the right access, it's very quick to identify. Even if a file was corrupt from a month ago, we can keep going back to other versions. Because we maintain other copies of the data, we can go back to one version that we know works, from the most recent edition of it.

One of the good features with file versioning in Nasuni is they'll only backup changes during the hourly snapshot, so even if someone had uploaded a lot of video content, for example, onto the network, and the last backup was half an hour ago, it'll only backup the changes to those files. With the bandwidth limits we've put in place, we know it's not going to impact the live data by doing the backup. That's an important feature because we're using the little and often approach. We're constantly backing up changes and it allows us to keep on top of the data we back up, and have very recent versions of it.

Nasuni has helped us to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We have known for perhaps three years that we were going to be phasing out our data centers. It was at this time when we started getting recommendations for Nasuni. Ultimately, it has helped to drive down the costs. Considering the whole backend infrastructure of what we would need in a data center to support devices like this, the costs have been much reduced and we've had no reduction in terms of reliability, which is the key thing. We've had an improved level of service with reduced costs, which is obviously a very big plus.

This product helps to simplify infrastructure purchasing and support requirements. We had looked up what sort of type of network you need and whether we needed to have a certain speed. We have Nasuni appliances in offices with a 50 meg internet connection, and then we've got them in offices with a 10 gig internet connection, so it shows you don't need to spend big money on your network infrastructure.

One of the good features of Nasuni is that it allows you to make the changes you need to, depending on your environment. We've got a range of offices of different sizes and internet speeds but we can still provide the same level of service.

In some of the smaller sites that we have in the UK, we had to increase the internet speeds. This happened because people had data stored in other places and said, "All right, we want to put this into Nasuni as well." This meant that there were some small increments of the internet circuits we needed, but we found that it was still far outweighed by the overall cost saving we've made with data centers, and for hiring network infrastructure that we've had to purchase in the past.

Nasuni has helped to decrease capital costs because we haven't had to buy as much excess capacity. When we've had the need to order an appliance, we've tried to do a bit of forecasting on current data sizes and how that might grow over time. One of the good things with Nasuni is that we've got it set so that if data isn't accessed over six to twelve months, it is archived. It can still be retrieved if necessary, but without it being stored on the main device, you can keep it the same size. Your data size can go up but it's because it only presents the most recently used data. That really helps us, not having to order new physical devices every couple of years. 

The Nasuni filers are easy to use. 

The Nasuni management dashboard is helpful because, on the administration side, I'm able to view all of the different filers that we have in the UK, rather than check each one of them individually.

We can configure alerts, which is a useful feature. We have a remote service support team and we've only handed over support to them in the last six months. Prior to that, a lot of support was the responsibility of the local IT teams that I managed. I was able to keep in touch with my colleagues in each local office to see if they needed updates supplied, or if they had issues with their devices. I was able to see all of this on one page, which was very useful because I could then drill into the details, as and when I needed to.

Nasuni provides options to limit the bandwidth of your live data as well as your backups, so you can perform backups after hours if needed.

When we first set up our bandwidth limiting, we had a few problems when it came to managing it. This is something that could be made easier; however, we were able to make the changes that we needed to for our environment.

I have been using Nasuni for approximately three years.

Nasuni is a stable product. Our users have really noticed the difference, just in having a web-based backup and the file shares available with the on-site appliance, 24/7.

We have found that people weren't needing to come into the office as much to work, even during pre-pandemic times. People really noticed the difference in terms of how much more flexible it made their teams, especially if they weren't all physically located in one office or country. It meant that they could still work on data and review different versions of files.

Especially with the business that I work in, if they're preparing pitch documents, they'll sometimes want to look at other versions of files, perhaps five versions earlier, just to compare. With Nasuni, they have that option readily available, and that took the pressure off my teams to support them because the features were there for them to use.

Across the UK, we have approximately 15 local IT support staff. We also have a backend network team, so if there are server issues or network outages, we can escalate to another team of five. However, on the administration side, day-to-day, it is very low because once the system is set up and stable, we don't encounter very many issues with it.

In summary, we have the trust that it delivers the stability we need for our products.

The scalability is really good. The fact you can increase your data, and the way it only presents the active data, is very helpful. Initially, for some of our brands, we thought that we needed to have a large amount of data available over time. Then, with some analysis on Nasuni, we realized pretty quickly they only needed a small portion of that available but we were able to present the data to them, without them realizing not all of it was actively available. These changes were invisible to our users that access the shares so it allowed us to present in a way it was more cost-effective, and allowed us to be more scalable if they were accessing lots of data regularly. We have the capacity to do that without changing hardware.

Currently, we have eight on-premises devices across our offices in the UK. In these offices, we have file shares for approximately 4,000 users and the bulk of them are standard-level access. We are currently expanding our use of this solution across our American offices.

Most of our business users have access to at least one or two of our Nasuni file shares. We find them being used regularly until late weeknights and weekends. As it allows people in the business to work in any capacity they need, it's used extensively. We see hundreds of users connected to file shares every day.

Now that we're coming out of lockdown, the usage of offices and people in the business is slowly rising. That said, everyone has access to some of the shares, and there are some teams that have smaller data sets that we're looking to migrate in, anywhere we don't have the data already stored in Nasuni. As the capacity of our business grows, and once we're aware of the data that is being used, we generally make plans to get it stored. As such, I expect usage to continue to increase. It makes sense because we have that single, secure platform for it.

In the UK, there are a few different teams, especially within our creative brands. They may have a high level of access where they can create and administer folders, but Nasuni allows us to manage the non-standard requests as and when they're needed. For the volume of users we have for accessing that data, we see very few issues that present themselves.

In the UK, we started with on-premises filers. We had identified the offices where we needed to have replacements for our existing mix of on-premises file servers.

Scalability options for Nasuni include the ability to host data purely in the cloud, so some of the offices outside of the UK are now looking at that option. If they don't have the need or resources to fund an on-premises appliance, there is a big appeal to this approach because they can choose the way the data is available to users in the business.

Nasuni makes it easy to configure organizational changes. Something that we're looking at now is a cloud version of a Nasuni server. We found there are templates that allow you to build a server from scratch, so that definitely makes the cloud hosting element of Nasuni a lot easier to configure. You don't need to know all of the technical aspects of building a server from traditional Windows or a Linux operating system. You can replicate current service setups to a new one as well, so the tools have improved and got better over time. The support that we have with Nasuni gives us good options, so if our needs change, we feel like Nasuni is able to cope with those changes.

The scalability of these devices is the part that really did appeal to us and continues to do so. The whole ability to scale up data sizes but keep the same hardware for three years, if there are no hardware issues in that time, allows us to manage our data without having to make big investments on either hardware or supporting infrastructure. That has really helped us prove to our other offices around the business that it's a worthwhile investment to go with Nasuni.

We have been in contact with technical support a few times.

Certainly, at the start when we were doing the initial rollout, we had contact with them. Also, we did have a hardware issue on a server last year, so we had to involve support on that occasion. There were some internal parts that had to be replaced in some of the Nasuni servers last year, as well, so we had to wait for parts to be delivered. With the support and guidance of tech support, we were able to replace those after hours.

Overall, our experience with support, starting with logging tickets using the portal, is that they were quite responsive and helpful. I would rate them an eight out of ten. Not only were the replies quick but I think that the main Nasuni support is based in the US, and they made sure that someone was available UK time. Generally, we do stuff outside of business hours in the UK, and we found the support was there when we needed it at the right time, and that was very important because we were able to rely on it.

Prior to Nasuni, we had a mix of standard Windows file shares and different products. It was not a single product. Rather, it was various pieces of equipment that we had inherited. This is why we found it a lot more challenging to manage the data we had.

We switched because of the need to have a single platform. We needed something that we could rely on because we were spending more and more time on basic administration because the file shares were on different platforms, which meant that we had to grant different people access to multiple platforms. It was a lot more open to problems.

With our business, the drive was to a Cloud-First strategy and using Nasuni allowed us to meet that goal and to simplify the support we provide.

Because our data wasn't in a great state to start with, it probably took more time for planning than it should have. That was more fault on our side but what we saw fairly quickly, in terms of what Nasuni can do, helped us clear the picture of what we wanted to do or what we could do. We started with something reasonably complex but when we got Nasuni up and running, it had simplified the process for us.

With one physical device, you could have multiple volumes. When we merged multiple companies in the past, some of them had their own individual servers. We realized that you could have separate virtual servers or separate volumes within a single physical appliance, but you could still keep your data separated securely with the right permissions. That was another reason Nasuni appealed to us. It gave us more options to be flexible, and to an end-user, their file shares were on a shared physical device but they were still separated in terms of security.

In our first phase of the implementation, where we ordered five of the devices, it took seven or eight weeks to prepare the network information, order the units, and get the first one installed. It was probably another two months on top of that before we had the last of the five devices installed, so the deployment took between four and five months in total.

Our implementation strategy included trying to merge as many data sets into Nasuni as we could. It was not just all data and file servers. People, especially within our creative teams, had hard drives with lots of data that wasn't backed up. One of our goals was to simplify support and storage and make it secure, having it all backed up. As the deployment was rolled out, we improved things in these aspects.

When updates come out, we normally wait a few weeks to do the latest upgrades. For the most part, we keep them up to date.

It was myself and a couple of my colleagues who deployed the devices. We looked at the data for different offices around the UK and we collated data sizes and specifications. Between us, we looked at the size of appliances we needed in each site and then worked with Nasuni to implement and set those up.

We had assistance from a third party called Nephos Technologies, which is a professional services outlet that was recommended. We discussed plans that we had for them and then we provided them with data. They gave us some recommendations for each of the offices that we wanted to set up. Their assistance really helped us in the process.

I would rate Nephos and eight and a half out of ten. We found that they were flexible, understood our current challenges, and what we wanted to do. Like any project, timelines had to change. For example, we had to change the order of servers that we installed. Although the plan did change between when we started and when we finished, the support we got helped us to accommodate those changes.

Our ROI is in terms of the time that we have saved when it comes to supporting our users. When you consider the cost of the product and compare it to running the service, you find that the cost is flat when you have to increase your usage and data. This is something that was very appealing. 

We're looking at a global agreement on the licensing from Nasuni now, as we're expanding to other markets. We ordered five or six units to start, which helped with our pricing model.

When we first implemented Nasuni, we gave them an estimate of how many terabytes of storage we wanted to support, which helped to define the types of appliances we needed. We conduct annual reviews to see whether we're meeting our current and future needs, and as a result, we have increased our storage capacity. We've generally kept the same models of appliances, just because of the way Nusani stores the data.

The cost is based on the capacity, which is approximately $100 USD per terabyte.

In our case, we pay for both hardware support and software support. The software support is for the amount of data that we have and the hardware support is for the actual appliances that we have in our offices.

We incurred some additional costs when we asked for help from professional services. These were for offices in other countries that needed assistance with getting their devices installed.

When we were first looking into Nasuni, it was because of recommendations that we'd received and information that we had read online. There were other products, but Nasuni worked well for what we wanted to do at the time. All we needed was a good network connection and a secure room to store the Nasuni device, and we're able to manage that device remotely or on-site, as and when we need to.

There were some other Cloud platforms in use within smaller parts of our business at the time, so we reviewed those, spoke to some of the staff in the business and other IT teams for their input, and compared them against what Nasuni could offer. Through a process of elimination and pricing features, we realized Nasuni was looking like our best option, so it was the one we chose with all those factors in mind.

We use traditional file shares like Windows, Mac, and SMB files shares. As such, we haven't needed to take advantage of the storage for hosting VDI environments.

The switch from an on-premises device to the web is something we will test more, probably towards the start of next year. We would like to be able to have an office have a smaller on-site appliance with more data in the cloud. We will want to determine things like whether it needs a faster internet connection if you only have a web version of your data. Some of our other offices outside the UK will be testing that more than we currently do at the moment.

If a colleague of mine at another company was concerned about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would say that based on the experience that I've had to this point, I definitely recommend it. I can recommend Nasuni just for reliability and scalability, as it definitely ticks those two boxes. I can't say anything other than good things about it.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Nasuni is to start by looking at where you're going to host your data. Do you want cloud-based storage, on-premises, or a hybrid of both? It has a range of options for different needs, which is one of the things that makes it a great product. It meets our need for standard and large individual file storage, and it is invisible to someone that uses it.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is related to scalability. We have been able to meet the very different needs of our business. We have a wide range of users and departments that want different things presented to them, and Nasuni allows you to present that on the backend in one way to people of different needs, so that it can fit whatever's needed for the business.

As I've progressed within my role in the IT support teams, it has increased my need to know more about the product and see how it affects our staff and the business.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Nasuni for our network file servers. My company switched from Windows file servers to Nasuni, and we leveraged it to manage migrations between data centers.

The storage is fully in the cloud, and we are starting to migrate more as a company towards the cloud. I would say today, we have about a quarter of our overall workload in the cloud.  However, in the next few years, we will shift even further into the cloud.

Nasuni helps us streamline file storage and access across multiple locations. That's why we bought it. We had performance issues with a single Windows file server in one location when we had users and data centers in multiple locations. The technology enables us to make data more local to multiple different locations for users. We've been able to consolidate some of our file systems. We've combined SMB file shares and NFS into a single product.

The solution improved our organization by simplifying management and helping us to consolidate products. It makes recovery easier and ensures high resiliency. It has reduced our management overhead by about 30 percent. We used to have two different teams—managed NFS and managed SMB. We've consolidated collapsed teams, which is good from a support perspective. Also, we don't need to patch and upgrade the capabilities as much anymore.

It hasn't affected how our business operates much, but that's the great thing about it. It's a service that nobody notices, and if nobody notices, we're doing our job. It's reliable enough to where nobody's complaining about their file storage needs.

Nasuni is easy to manage and highly resilient. Resiliency is critical. We had a data center outage, but we were then able to repoint people to one of our other filers easily and keep everything available. It's an excellent hybrid cloud product. I like the unlimited snapshotting. The visibility is pretty good, but we aren't leveraging all the capabilities to give us a 360 view. The solution allows us to provide file storage on demand. That capability is essential. 

We only use Nasuni's snapshotting features. We're primarily using other third-party security products for data protection. I'd love to use Nasuni's data protection features, but our security team wants to use their own stuff. Nasuni's continuous file versioning has saved us a couple of times. It just makes recovery effortless. It's a self-service feature where users can recover their own files if necessary.

There are some issues with multiple users accessing the same file simultaneously. There would be times when the global file would lock when several people tried to access it, so that could be optimized more.

We have used Nasuni since 2018.

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10 for stability. We have had a few bugs and issues along the way, but it's been pretty good overall. I wouldn't say it's flawless. 

Nasuni is scalable. We have over 5,000 users. 

I rate Nasuni support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We previously used Windows File Servers. Nasuni costs more but we obtained some excellent features that we didn't have before. 

Setting up Nasuni is very straightforward. It's easy. It took us about four months, but we were moving a ton of data. We completed the migration in a reasonable amount of time. 

I can't quantify the ROI precisely. It isn't significant, but we've seen some benefits. 

Nasuni is cost-effective. It's a relatively affordable solution. We compared it with other products and felt like it was a good price.

We considered a few options, including Panzura, HPE, Amazon, CTERA Edge, and Cohesity.

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10. I recommend doing a POC before implementing Nasuni. Make it your primary filer tool and take time to understand your server sizing. 

I am a Nasuni implementer, not an end user. We have deployed Nasuni at nearly 150 offices worldwide. The backend is an IBM cloud, and we use VMware ESXi on the deployment side. Due to the price of the IBM cloud, we will likely switch to Azure or AWS. 

From a disaster recovery perspective, we have synchronization across three locations: Houston, Atlanta, and one other. Nasuni is replicating among those. The IBM cloud is in the backend, and we deploy the Nasuni filer appliance to various locations. It transmits the cache to that particular location's bucket, which is replicated in the cloud data center, providing redundancy.

We haven't enabled Nasuni's Access Anywhere feature on this project because the client doesn't want users to access storage from anywhere. Users need to connect with the network via VPN, and they access the solution from there. We have also enabled global file locking, where the data resides at other locations, but most users access it from another place. 

In organizations where we had implemented Nasuni, we performed migrations and a few other tasks, like consolidating the data and legacy domains. We migrated the existing data onto Nasuni, simplifying the environment by consolidating multiple file servers at the exact location. We eliminated the numerous storage devices from Windows, NetApp, or other vendors.

By switching our clients to Nasuni, we decreased our clients' on-prem footprint and significantly reduced costs. For example, let's say a client has ten NetApp file servers in one location, we can replace all of those with a single Nasuni appliance. A mid-sized appliance can replace five or six file servers, and a small one can replace one or two. 

When existing file servers reach the end of their lifecycles, we must replace them with new hardware. We recommended that the client adopt Nasuni, so the client saved capital costs by reducing the hardware space and hosting charges. At the end of the day, it definitely reduces capital and operational costs. I can't say how much because I'm unaware of the license costs. 

My clients are happy with Nasuni because the transmission is seamless, and it consolidates all the existing file servers into one location. Also, Nasuni has no boundaries. It's infinitely expandable. They don't have to rely on the service provider for backup and restoration. It's self-serve. 

Nasuni has an excellent management console that gives us visibility into all locations worldwide. Everything is visible from a single dashboard. We can see the amount of data stored and the number of servers or users connected. It also has metrics on the utilization of bandwidth and other resources. Nasuni provides a single portal from which we can control and monitor data. 

It offers clients unlimited file-storage expansion with an IBM cloud on the backend. We buy petabyte licenses for our clients and add licenses if we exceed the limit.

Data protection is another crucial feature. Nasuni creates snapshots of the data in my environment with versioning. Users can revert to the previous versions on their own. We have a strong contingency plan if a client is attacked. They can restore the data from the portal. 

We forecasted that the data at my client's organization would grow by about ten percent annually, but we are migrating more data because we are bringing in some servers that had not previously been within the scope of our license. We expected it would take us two years to reach a specific amount of data, but we hit that mark in one year. The licensing cost skyrocketed, so we need to renegotiate. It puts us in a bind because we are reliant on Nasuni for our service strategy. We can't deny our customers, but we also struggle to pay for that. 

I have used Nasuni for two and a half years. Once we finish migrating this organization to Nasuni in July, I will move on to another project. 

We haven't experienced any downtime in the last two-and-a-half years during our global deployment. So we haven't got any downtime because everything is hosted in our organization. We can't say that it's hosted somewhere else. If it is going to be down, that means our infrastructure is going down first.

I rate Nasuni support a ten out of ten. They provide instant support when we have an outage that affects 20 or so users. Nasuni sends a senior engineer. Other vendors like Microsoft don't escalate that quickly. 

Positive

My clients used on-prem Windows file servers in each office, but Nasuni is a cloud-based solution, so it's more reliable. Nasuni has advantages over competing solutions like Windows File Server, NetApp, StorSimple, etc. Nasuni provides a single portal we can use to manage and monitor data. 

It also allows unlimited expansion of storage, which is unavailable on a traditional Windows File Server. You aren't limited by dependence on a storage site or the EMC backup. Nasuni's console backs up automatically without any interventions, and you can restore from there. Nasuni has many features that Windows Files Server or NetApp devices can't provide.

I can only speak for my client's use case, but deploying Nansuni was complex because we migrated data from existing Windows file servers or traditional storage solutions to Nasuni. It was a complex lift-and-shift operation because we needed to consolidate the domains and data. However, it should be straightforward if you are migrating some existing data to Nasuni. 

We did the POC in 2018 but didn't deploy Nasuni until 2020. We were doing POCs for multiple solutions before we finalized our decision. The implementation started in 2020, and we still aren't finished with the project, but we finished deploying most of the locations. The total deployment time depends on the organization's size, the number of servers and locations, and the amount of data you are migrating.  

Our client determined the deployment strategy. After the POC, the client was more confident in the solution, and a strategy started taking shape, but new challenges emerged. We had to consult with the IT teams at each location, who were worried about where the data would reside and complications due to GDPR or other national regulations that require data to stay within the country. The strategy was not a straight line and depended on various agreements everyone had to reach. 

The size of the team needed also depends on your organization and the number of filers deployed across the organization. I can't give a simple answer that you need X number of people. In our case, it involved VM, storage, cloud, and network teams. 

After deployment, we have to do periodic upgrades. Nasuni's management console displays the version of each filer. We need to upgrade, but it requires downtime. Each week, we have a region-specific patching window. The management is easy and practical. 

We are the implementer, but we open a ticket with Nasuni support when we face an issue that we can't fix. We provide them remote access, so they take over the console and fix the issue. 

Azure has a similar solution in its early stages called StorSimple, but it isn't as reliable yet. You can control and integrate multiple clouds in the backend seamlessly and control storage globally from a single console.

I rate Nasuni a nine out of ten. I'm satisfied.

If you plan to implement Nasuni, I recommend reading the company's white paper with all the details and technical specifications during the POC. Nasuni allocated a dedicated resource to help us through the POC process. Contact Nasuni and see what resources are available to help you implement it. 

We are using it as a file share server. The solution is for CIFS and Windows file shares. We have boxes deployed in different environments, including on-prem and, in a few locations, it's in a virtual image.

We provide support to our customers and are currently managing more than 200 devices.

We use it at the global level and it supports a 360-degree view of the data.

It's also easy to deploy. Before, with hardware, it was not possible to deploy things as quickly, but because Nasuni is available in the cloud, as well as via a VDI image, you can deploy it quickly.

Another benefit is that our RPO and RTO are very much reduced. If a user has deleted something, we can provide the latest backup. For example, if they deleted something at 11 AM, we have the backup available from 10:55 AM.

It also helps eliminate on-premises infrastructure. All the data is stored in the cloud, either in block or S3, and that means you do not need large storage hardware in your data centers. You just need an internet connection to connect with the device. That will save costs on space, air conditioning, and power.

And it will reduce your capital cost, with only OpEx contributing to the costs.

The most valuable features are the

• replication
• snapshots.

Nasuni has the capability of taking a snapshot every five minutes. If a user has accidentally deleted their data, we can recover it from the snapshot and provide the latest data to the user. It's a really great feature, one that is not provided by other vendors.

The solution is very important for us because of these features, as well as because there is a cloud version, virtual image, and the physical box.

It also replaces multiple data toolsets with a single global file system.

Also, for provisioning file storage, because Nasuni is a cache device and doesn't store any data—all the data is stored in the cloud—you can provision as much as is needed, spinning up instances as they are required. That means that even if a customer has heavy data requests, we can fulfill them in less than 24 hours. We just spin up the instance, connect it, and it's available for use.

And for some users who are accessing data on-premises, we are able to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments.

Nasuni also has an embedded feature, an antivirus, which will automatically scan for issues with any file. If a file is infected, it will not be saved on the disk.

Access Anywhere is also a great feature, allowing you to access data from your mobile and from your desktop.

And suppose a disaster happens. Nasuni's metadata is available within 20 minutes, meaning you can deploy the new instance and map the data, copying the data from the cloud.

The only issue we face with Nasuni is from the performance perspective. Sometimes, when we deploy a Nasuni device, it doesn't meet our requirements. It's a capacity-planning issue.

I have been working on Nasuni since 2018.

It's stable.

Nasuni's support is very good. They provide solutions on a priority basis.

Positive

It's easy to deploy, hardly taking an hour, on average, and requires minimal staff for both the deployment and management. A single person can easily manage it.

When we have migrated all of a customer's data to Nasuni, none have said that they had much ROI from their then-existing solution. Nasuni is a cheaper solution with good ROI compared to other solutions.

Nasuni should provide small-scale licenses, like a 20 TB license. Currently, the smallest is a 30 TB license. Smaller-capacity licenses would be good for some users and help increase Nasuni's sales.

NetApp doesn't have the same features for managing devices, whereas from the Nasuni Management Console, you can manage multiple devices at the same time. The centralized management is a great feature.

The only disadvantage of Nasuni is due to the fact that all the data is in the cloud. Other devices, like Panzura, have the data in the cloud as well as local copies.

If you're concerned about migration to the cloud, you can use Snowball to move the data to the cloud and then you can upload it to Nasuni. There are a lot of options available.

I can't think of any features that should be added to Nasuni. It's a good product.