Nasuni Reviews

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.

I work for a retail company. We have our users spread out geographically across the globe. We have deployed Nasuni in all our remote locations. With this service, we are catering to users across different continents, such as the EMEA, APAC, North American, and South American regions.

It is deployed on-premises through Azure appliances.

Nasuni deployment, along with its DFS capabilities, help with our SLA and RPO requirements. For example, if there is a site in Las Vegas and another site in San Francisco, and the Las Vegas site is down, then with the help of DFS, we can redirect clients to access the site from the back-end using the same path. The San Francisco site is then enabled and in an active state, but still clients will not have any issues connecting because of the Nasuni solution. So, this is an innovative solution that helps with the overall RPO requirements of our enterprise. 80% to 90% of the time, we are satisfied with its performance and with availability.

It is easy and seamless to configure Nasuni to support our organizational changes. We deployed the solution through a virtual appliance. If that particular virtual appliance is corrupted in any way, then we can deploy the OVA within no time. Within an hour, we can deploy and redirect users to the new appliance, then it can continue serving customers' requests.

There is a feature known as Global File Lock. If one of the users is accessing a file from another geographical location from where he is working, then this feature helps maintain the integrity of the file. It could be a Doc file, spreadsheet, etc.

Everything about Nasuni is easy, in terms of setup, deployment, access, and seeing the directory structure. Based on the DFS path, we are creating a directory structure, where we are pointing to multiple locations in a single directory structure. Nasuni helps with that. 

There is a minimal firewall requirement so we don't have to worry too much about the firewall.

With Nasuni Management Console (NMC), we get a single, centralized view of our entire internal structure and data center structure. This is very important because this caters to remote locations. One of the main care center teams is dependent on this solution. As it is directly connected to customers for the calls that they receive and troubleshoot, they can then help customers out in case they are not able to place an order. 

It provides file storage capacity anywhere it's needed on demand and without limits. The object storage capability helps provide storage to Nasuni.

In terms of simplicity, we have had 100% satisfaction.

The Nasuni file storage platform doesn't work well when there are a high number of small files. This is the case when a directory structure contains more than 10,000 or 20,000 small files, e.g., 5 KB, 10 KB, or 15 KB. When the user is accessing these files from another geographical location, they might face a slow response or timeouts when connecting to the shares, and then to the files. This is because the file size is small. There is a scope of improvement with this solution when it comes to accessing a large number of small files.

We have been using it for about five years.

Stability is at 80%. It is reliable. We get monthly newsletters from Nasuni regarding the state of the systems running on certain versions.

Scalability-wise, it is at 90%. We can easily scale the system.

There are close to 5,000 users across the globe who are using it for multiple purposes. Some of them are using it because they are part of the applications team. There are also some care center executives using it.

The technical support team doesn't have a lot of engineers to help customers. Thus, the response time can be a bit slower than with other vendor support. I would rate them as six out of 10.

Neutral

This was a new solution for us. We wanted to have Nasuni in place to increase our global footprint.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took 30 days to deploy to all our locations. We went with the site-by-site approach.

We worked with the Nasuni account rep team. They shared portal access to all our administrators as well as the images that we need to deploy to OVAs. Before that, we took care of the firewall network and all its prerequisites. Then, we took care of the basic finances. Once that was done and based on geographical locations, we started deploying the OVA. We shared those paths with the end users and relevant teams who could also do testing. Once they were happy, we declared that the systems were in production.

The architecture team had a meeting with Nasuni. Then, within a couple of months, we decide on the solution and design. Once they approved it, the deployment was done within no time, which simplified everything.

5 to 10 people are involved in the deployment.

We have seen 100% ROI.

For some sites, it has helped us to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. For our enterprise, there are four major data center locations. We have physical data centers, which we share and a couple that we own. This solution helped us by having us avoid investing in on-premises infrastructure-related costs, saving us about 50% of the cost by just deploying the OVA through the ESX app. Instead, we are just investing in the vCenter environment, then deploying the OVA through that.

This solution has helped minimize our administration work. Because of its simplicity, you can log into NMC and get a global footprint of which files are working and which are having some issues. So, the interface helps us take a look at our infrastructure.

Nasuni has helped decrease capital costs by 66% since we don’t need to buy as much excess capacity. 

With this solution, the license renewal is pretty swift. With the virtual appliance, you just need to take care of the OS versions and patches. In a way, we don't have to struggle much with renewals because the only thing that we need to take care of are the licenses. We renew it every three years. This aspect goes with infrastructural costs because it doesn't cost us too much to maintain the solution.

There is a cost associated with vCenter maintenance.

It is a cost-effective solution. If performance is not a priority and you want to build a cost-effective solution for the remote sites, then this is a recommended solution for you.

Nasuni's file storage footprint is not that significant when it is spread out across the globe and deployed through a virtual appliance. 

If you need to deploy physical storage, then the footprint is larger and performance-intensive. Nasuni is not recommended in these cases.

It provides Continuous File Versioning, but we disabled that feature. From an administrative perspective, we disabled it because we wanted to ensure that we control the access to the previous versions for users.

We use the solution regularly. We don't have plans to increase usage since we use it for a specific use case.

I would rate this solution as eight out of 10.

We use Nasuni to provide storage at various locations. It is for office-type files that they would use for day-to-day office work, such as spreadsheets. None of it is critical data.

Each group at each site has its own data store. For example, HR has its own, and finance has its own. All of these different groups at different locations use this data, and they use these filers to store it.

The Nasuni filers are on-site, and we have virtual edge appliances on ESX servers at about 35 sites globally. The data stored at these sites is then fed up into Azure and we have all of our data stored there.

The OR and DR capabilities have been a very big help for us. Previously, with the solutions we had, it would have taken weeks sometimes to get things fixed and back up and running for people. Now, it only takes a matter of minutes.

It used to be a lot of trouble to bring data back up and a lot of the time, it was read-only, so the people couldn't use it very well. Now, with Nasuni, we're able to pretty much keep their experience seamless, no matter how much trouble the hardware is in at the site.

The Nasuni filers are easy to manage, although the process is similar to what we had before. We have a report that comes out three times a day that gives us the amount of data that's in the queue to be uploaded to Azure on each individual filer. We keep track of that to make sure nothing is getting out of hand. It also tells us if the filer has been restarted and how long ago that happened. It gives us a quick view of everything and how much total we're using within Nasuni. This report is something we created on our own to keep track of things.

If a user deletes a file or a file becomes corrupted, it's easy for them to get it restored. There is very little chance that the data is going to be done. We've had a few people delete things, or they have become corrupted, and we were able to get that file back to them in the states that it was in about five minutes before they had a problem. We were able to do this without any issues. Overall, the continuous file versioning is really helpful.

The biggest and most impressive thing for us is the operational recovery (OR) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities that Nasuni has. If a filer goes down, or an ESX server goes down, then we can quickly recover. For example, we lost a controller the other day and all of the drives were corrupted. We were able to quickly repoint all of the users to a backup filer that we have at our data center, they were back up and running within minutes, and they still have read-write capabilities. Once that ESX server was fixed, we were able to repoint everything back to it in a matter of minutes. People were then again using their local filer to connect.

Nasuni provides continuous file versioning and we take snapshots on a regular basis. Right now, we have them stored forever, but we're trying to reign that in a little bit and keep them only for a period of time. Certainly, at this point, we have a lot of file versions.

We have not had a problem with ransomware but if we did, we would be able to restore the data pretty quickly by going back to an older version of the file before the ransomware took over. It is a similar process to the DR, although a little bit different. For us, OR and DR are pretty much the same thing. We haven't had any disasters that we've had to recover from but we've had three or four hardware failures a year that we've had to deal with. The continuous file versioning has helped to fix these problems pretty quickly.

Continuous file versioning also makes it easier for our operations group. The support team is able to restore files quickly, 24/7, and it is less work for them. They have more time to focus on other problems. The end-user also has access to shadow copies through Windows, and they've used that extensively at the sites.

Nasuni has helped to eliminate our on-premises infrastructure. When we moved to Nasuni, we moved to Azure. Before that, we had a large SAN storage that we were using, and we were able to get rid of it. That was a big difference for us.

We were definitely able to save some money because we've eliminated those expensive SAN disks completely. There were some servers at our old data center that we were able to get rid of, as well. There are some new expenses with Azure because we have to pay for the space taken by the snapshots, which is why we're going to put a retention limit in place. Overall, I don't have an exact number but we were able to save money.

Nasuni is transparent to our end-users. We have it all set up as a file server through Microsoft DFS. If you were to ask one of our end-users how they like Nasuni, they would have no idea what you're talking about.

One issue that we have is related to copying data out of Nasuni. We just sold a site and it was split into two pieces. One part of it was sold to another company and we kept the other part. At the site, they have a Nasuni filer with about eight terabytes of data. Now, we have to split that data and the problem stems from the fact that the other company doesn't have Nasuni.

This means that we have to copy all of that data back to the site and into a format that they can use, which is probably just a Windows file server, and then we have to split it somehow. I'm not really sure that there's an easy way to do that. It's going to take us a little bit longer to separate this other location, and we're having to invent things as we go along.  

In these areas, it's not as simple as it could be, but it doesn't happen very often. As such, we haven't had to worry about it too often. Although it's not affecting us too much at this point, if there's a problem such that we have trouble getting data out of Nasuni, then that could be an issue. However, for the time being, it seems fine.

When we have to rebuild a filer or put a new one at a site, one of the things that I would like to be able to do is just repoint the data from Azure to it. As it is now, you need to copy it using a method like Robocopy. To me, this seems counterintuitive or like we're going backward a little bit. I would like to see a way to be able to switch them around without any problem. That said, I'm not sure if it would then cause other issues because of how Nasuni works, so it may not be possible.

We started using Nasuni in 2018 and it's been running ever since.

Up until about a week ago, the stability has been rock solid. We've actually had a few issues after upgrading to version 9.3 that we're trying to deal with. We have a couple of sites that we're still not sure if Nasuni is the problem, or if it's VMware ESX, and we're working on that. At this point, we're not thinking about rolling back because of all of our sites, only two of them have problems. As such, we think that something else may be going on.

For the most part, it's been extremely stable, with no issues whatsoever. With Nasuni, there has been very little downtime, if any. Most of the sites have never gone down and with the sites that have, there's usually some other external problem.

Overall, it's been very stable for us.

We are limited to the amount of space that we have purchased from Nasuni. If we get close to running out then we just buy more. We still have to pay for the storage within Azure, so we're trying to make sure that it doesn't get out of control. In general, we don't need to add any on demand.

Scalability is not a problem and we can add as many servers and as many filers as we need to, which is really nice. For example, instead of buying tape drives and using that type of backup system, we decided to take a few sites where we have some smaller servers and we use Nasuni to back them up. We use a separate filer to back up all of that data. It's been nice in that way, where we've been able to do things with it that we hadn't originally thought of.

If it should happen that we make a large acquisition, and we bought 10 sites, we could easily put in 10 more filers. It wouldn't be a problem.

Amongst our 35 sites, we have between 10,000 and 12,000 users. A lot of them are office-type people such as those from HR and finance. All of us, including administrators and developers, use it for this kind of thing. The developers wouldn't store code on these because that's not what it's used for. Our Nasuni environment is specifically for data to help the business run, which isn't critical to producing goods or shipping them or anything like that. That is a completely different system. Anybody who works for the company that needs to access simple office data is going to be going through Nasuni.

We have approximately 210 terabytes stored in Nasuni right now. That continues to grow at perhaps a terabyte or two per month. I don't think we'll be moving it anywhere else at this point. Down the road, we do have a very large file system at our data center that we're considering moving, but it's going to take a lot of time to do that one because it's 400 terabytes and it's a lot of old data that we have to clean up first. But that's pretty much the only area that I would see us doing something.

Later this year, we're going to start refreshing some of the hardware because we're approaching five years on some of the older stuff. As we replace it, we'll do another rollout, but it's not going to be like before. We're just going to put a new server in and put a new filer and connect to the data.

Up until recently, I would have rated the technical support a seven out of ten. We had to open a case in Australia for a problem with one of the Nasuni filers, and I haven't got a response for it yet. We had one of the support people answer a question at about three in the morning, US East Coast time, and he said something to the effect that he would send an email giving an update. After that, we didn't hear back from him until about 25 hours later, which was a little concerning for me.

Part of the problem seems to be that Nasuni currently is not set up to do 24/7 support. They said that they were going to do that, so that was a little disappointing. Typically when we call in a problem, they jump all over it and they get it fixed in no time.

From the perspective of our end-users, the servers function the same way when they're working. We had Windows filers before and now they're Nasuni, so it's basically the same thing to them.

Although we mostly used Microsoft, we did use a backup solution called Double-Take, which is now owned by Carbonite. It did the job but it had a lot of idiosyncrasies that were very difficult to deal with at times. That was the only non-Microsoft thing that we used for the data before Nasuni, and we have since stopped using it.

In the beginning, the setup was kind of complex. We did have help from Nasuni, which was great. They were with us the whole time. We had some growing pains at the beginning, but once we figured out the first three or four sites, we were able to get everything done very quickly and efficiently, with very few problems moving to Nasuni.

When we first started with Nasuni, we had never used it before, and we had never used anything like that. We were used to using Windows servers, and there was a learning curve there to figure out the best way to set up the Nasuni filers. We really had to rely a lot on Nasuni for that. Some of it was trial and error, seeing what worked best as we started rolling it out.

We were replacing a single server that was responsible for doing everything. It was a file server, a domain controller, a print server, and an SCCM distribution point. It was all of these different things and we replaced that with one ESX server, which had multiple guest servers on it, doing all those functions separately. It is much better security-wise and much better operationally.

We started with a very slow implementation. We implemented one site, and then we waited two months before moving to the second site. We tried to start with some of the smaller sites first, with the least amount of data, to get our feet wet. Also, the first site we did was the one that I sit at. The team was all there and it was our site, so we figured we should do our site first. We staggered deployment, so it was not very quick. Then, once we had three or four completed, we did three a week for three months and we were done.

After completing the first site, choosing the next sites had to do with the hardware. We had some old hardware that we repurposed, so we did those sites next. After that, we moved to the sites that necessitated purchasing new hardware. 

From beginning to end, our implementation took a little more than a year. It began in August of 2018 and finished at the end of Q3 in 2019. The time it took was not because of Nasuni. Rather, it revolved around different ordering cycles in our company. Buying the new hardware was what stretched out the deployment time.

I was in charge of the team that did the implementation.

For purchasing and the initial negotiations with Nasuni, we used CDW. We still interact with them when it's time to do renewals, and they are great to deal with. They really help out quite a bit. They were the ones that brought us Nasuni in the first place and suggested that we take a look at it.

We're very happy with CDW. We use them for all of our hardware orders, and a couple of different infrastructure tools. We use them quite extensively.

We had four people responsible for the deployments, with one guy who was in charge of the group as the lead architect. Once it was deployed, we turned it over to our operations group, which is outsourced to TCS. Although they have supported us since then, they come to us if there's anything that's still an issue. We have a couple of guys that still work with Nasuni a little bit, but that's basically how the maintenance is done.

For the most part, there is little maintenance to do. There are situations such as when a controller card goes down, or like the issues we have been having since the upgrade. Otherwise, it's very hands-off and you really don't have to do a lot.

We don't plan on calculating a return on investment with this solution. In the grand scheme of things, it's really not very much money for what we're doing. We spend more money on the hardware, for example.

Our agreement is set up such that we pay annually per terabyte, and we buy a chunk of it at a time. Then if we run out of space, we go back to them and buy another chunk.

We thought about an agreement with a three-year plan, where we would get a small increase every year, but we decided not to take that approach at this time. We go through CDW for these agreements and they help us get all of the quotes together.

In addition to what we pay Nasuni, there is the cost of storage in Azure or whatever cloud service you're using. It can get pretty pricey if you have a lot of snapshots, which is something we've found and we're now trying to scale back on. That's the biggest thing that is extra and you may not think of right at the beginning.

We looked at a few different products that year, and we decided that Nasuni was the best way to go. It has really worked well for us.

One of the products that we looked at was Veeam, the backup software, but it would have been used a little bit differently. We also looked at Backup Exec and a tool from Microsoft. We didn't look at anything that was exactly like Nasuni. We looked at these other things that would create backups of the primary data, which would have stayed at the site. Nasuni was a completely different way of looking at it.

The difference with Nasuni is that rather than having a backup in the cloud, the primary copy of the data is what's in the cloud. For us, it's stored in Azure, whereas with the other tools, the primary copy stays at the site. If you had a major problem, for instance, this issue with the controller card, the problem with these other solutions or the way it was before was that you're down and out at least until you can get the controller card replaced.

Then, once you're back up, you're going to have to copy all of the data back. For that, it would probably need at least a week. Some of these sites have very poor connections. For example, we have a site that's in the Amazon jungle in Brazil and they are notorious for being very slow, yet we've used Nasuni there and it works fine. Some of these other solutions probably wouldn't have worked. In fact, we probably would have had to buy a tape drive and back up the servers that way.

We have a hosted data center where we don't pay for individual items, such as servers. Instead, we pay for a service. The service might include a server or storage, and Nasuni has not eliminated that because we still need our physical servers at the locations. We debated on whether or not to put the filer in Azure for each site, but we decided that it was better to have something local at this point.

For our company, we were a little ahead of the curve. We didn't have internet connections directly from each site, and they all routed through a central internet connection. Because of that, it was difficult to eliminate any hardware at the site. We needed something there physically. But, having the virtual appliance for Nasuni really helps out quite a bit, because then we only have to have one piece of hardware and we can put all of the other servers that we need for infrastructure on the same ESX server. We have five or six different servers that are doing different functions that at one point, would maybe have been three or four different physical servers. Now we've reduced it to one.

We use Microsoft SCOM as a monitoring tool to keep track of all of the filers and make sure that they are running. 

We don't use the Nasuni dashboard because we don't have to. Everything is working the way it is. We do have a management console set up and we do go into that occasionally, but it's not something that's a regular thing that our support people use.

If I had a colleague at another company with concerns about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would talk about the fact that the OR capabilities are so different than anything else that I've seen. The performance has actually not been too bad. You would think that there would be an issue with the cloud stores, but we set up a local cache on each filer that allows it to store up to a terabyte or two of regularly used data. That gets probably 80% of what people use, which means that they're accessing a local copy that's synced with what's in the cloud. This means that they don't really have to go to the cloud to get a lot of it. But when they do, it's pretty quick. It may not be as fast as if it were a local copy, but it's not too bad.

My advice for anybody who is considering Nasuni is that they definitely want to look at all of the options, but that Nasuni does have the best setup at this point. It offers the ability to recover things and provides data security. Especially with ransomware and all of these other new things that are causing lots of problems out there, it really helps mitigate some of that.

The biggest thing that I have learned from using Nasuni is that you shouldn't be afraid of the cloud.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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 are using Nasuni for all of our storage needs. All the storage for our video surveillance and documents is on a couple of Nasuni filers. We have around 29 filers. We have 3 physical filers, and we have 26 virtual filers.

In terms of the version, we upgraded Nasuni Management Console (NMC) on May 20. So, NMC is on 22.1, and the filers are also on the latest version, which is 9.7.3. 

We provide insurance and financial services to our clients, and we rely on physical and virtual Nasuni filers to store all our data and get it replicated and backed up properly on time so that we don't lose any data. It gets cascaded to other filers as well. So, if we can't access the data from one filer, we can certainly access the same data from other filers. It provides us with flexible and efficient data storage and data replication.

It has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. We were using TSM previously. We replaced all those with Nasuni. We need these filers running, especially during the US daytime. They're, for sure, very critical. If any filer goes down during the day, we normally open a P1 ticket.

We have a lot of users who are accessing the data during business hours. So, if any filer goes down, it is a straight downtime for the users. They cannot access their documents and video surveillance. It is extremely important for sure.

It enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it is needed, on-demand, and without limits. Our license is for around 226 terabytes, and currently, we are close to 200 terabytes. It is very important for us that our data is replicated and snapshots are taken on time.

It provides simplicity of management. Our previous solution was not that efficient. It was quite complex. The upgrades were not very smooth, but the most important thing was that it was outdated. It was very old technology. After we moved to Nasuni, there are three locations where we have physical filers, and then there are 26 filers that we can access virtually. Comparing the old system with Nasuni, there are definitely a lot of advantages that we are getting from Nasuni. We are still working around certain issues with Nasuni, but the advantages still are much more than the issues that we are facing.

It provides continuous file versioning, which is very helpful. Just a month ago, an application team lost two terabytes of production data, and because of Nasuni's replication and snapshot capability, we were able to restore the complete data in about 90 minutes.

Continuous versioning helps us to maintain all the versions. When needed, it helps us go back to any version on the filer to support our IT teams and our customers.

If a user deletes a file or a file has been corrupted, we can easily go back to the previous version, and we can easily access the version without starting from scratch.

It has been helpful in eliminating on-premises infrastructure. We have only three physical servers. They are located in Bloomington, Aurora, and Chester, but we have 26 virtual servers. We are saving a lot of space by having those 26 virtual servers. It reduces our maintenance and storage costs. We have saved a lot there.

It simplifies infrastructure purchasing. For these 26 virtual servers, we don't need to have any physical servers. 

Our license is for around 226 terabytes. If we have to buy this much physical storage along with the backup and replication functionalities, the cost would be multifold, which is something we don't want to invest in right now and even in the future. We would prefer to continue with Nasuni.

Nasuni Management Console (NMC) is super valuable, and both physical and virtual filers are also valuable. 

NMC is the one-stop place for all our filers, both virtual and physical filers. They are definitely doing a great job in housing all our documents and surveillance videos. 

It comes at a reasonable price, and their support is also very proactive. Remote support assistance where we can just turn on remote support and then Nasuni's support people help us is valuable. 

There is some room for improvement when it comes to monitoring. We are not using Nasuni monitoring. We are using our own monitoring through Xenos. Nasuni can provide better monitoring capabilities for us to monitor all the filers and NMC so that we don't have to use a third-party tool.

In our company, we have been using it for many years, but I have been using it for more than a year.

It is pretty stable. Every now and then, we face some issues, but on average, it is pretty stable, and it is pretty efficient. It is the best solution which we can use. 

The upgrades are going smoothly. We get upgrades from Nasuni once or twice every quarter, and we make sure our product is up to date. We normally have one or two weeks of cooling time after we get the latest release, but we do ensure that NMC and all filers are always up to date with the latest release and security patches.

Nasuni is scalable. We just have to buy more licenses to meet our needs. Currently, our usage is at its peak. If the license is around 226 terabytes, we are already using more than 200 terabytes. We have not crossed the limit, but in the future, we probably will have to increase the licensing capacity. I don't know about our exact plans to increase its usage, but we are definitely using it super extensively.

We have more than 1,000 users from different backgrounds. Some are from the application development side, some are from the infrastructure side, and some are from the video surveillance side. The infrastructure and operation team is one of the main users of this solution, and we take care of the infrastructure and operations side, but we also have users from all other areas who use these filers to access their documents, surveillance videos, etc.

They provide great customer service and support. Their support is very proactive, and they help us with all the issues. I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I was not involved with its setup.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. We are super happy with our ROI.

Its price is fair and reasonable. I don't have anything negative about its pricing and licensing.

For us, there is also the cost of monitoring. We are monitoring through Xenos and not through Nasuni. That is another cost for us from the monitoring perspective, but as far as Nasuni goes, we don't have any other cost apart from the licensing fee.

I would definitely recommend Nasuni. It is a very effective and efficient product. It is reasonably priced, and it comes with great customer service and support.

I would rate Nasuni an eight out of ten.

Nasuni is our data storage solution. In addition, it's our data backup solution. As a construction company, we have onsite offices where we're building a building, a highway, or a water treatment plant, and we use Nasuni for data storage for all of those job sites. Additionally, for all of our regional offices, Nasuni is our storage solution for our entire company's internal data.

It has on-prem and SaaS components, but for all intents and purposes, it is on-prem.

Nasuni replaced our previous data storage solution for all our job sites back in 2018. Before that, if we had a job where a data server was stolen or a file was deleted, it was a long and onerous process to get that data back. For us, just like pretty much every other company out there, our data, our intellectual property, is significantly more important than the hardware itself. Once we rolled out Nasuni, we were able to restore deleted files in seconds, as opposed to days or weeks. It takes five or six clicks and we're able to restore data.

Additionally, if one of our offices has an electrical or power issue, we are able to move our end-users to a different edge appliance where they can access their data, minimizing downtime for our end-users.

It has also replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single, global file system, and that is extremely important. We have one platform to manage all of our data, to see it and to quickly access it, and that is huge. On top of that, Nasuni provides something called the NMC, or the Nasuni Management Console, which manages all of our Nasuni edge appliances. Not only can we manage the data, but we can also manage the appliances from a single pane of glass. Instead of having to log in to 50, 75, or 100 appliances, we can just log in to one device and manage everything from there, monitor alerts, push out updates, et cetera. It's really helpful.

With the NMC, when we are asked to restore a deleted file, we can do that from that one console, as opposed to going to the specific appliance the end-user was using to access data. From an IT perspective and a support perspective, the fact that we can use one location to access all of our edge appliances and do the work that we need to do, such as a file restore, makes it significantly easier for us. In turn, it makes things easier, quicker, and more efficient for our end-users. When a mistake happens, we can quickly apply whatever the corrective action may be and get our end-users back to accessing the data that they need.

The NMC has made things even simpler by providing one area where we can manage all of our edge appliances, as opposed to hitting each edge appliance individually. The NMC has really made it more efficient, streamlined, and simple for us to manage our data environment.

With Nasuni, our data is stored in volumes. If we have to provide data to an internal business group, it's easy for us to set up a new volume of data, if needed, to make it unique to that business group. We can also just provide remote access for another group internally to an existing volume that we have. In terms of giving the right people access to the data they need, Nasuni makes it pretty easy to do. That makes our business more efficient and more streamlined. It cuts down on internal workload and the tickets to our department, the IT department, to give end-users access to the data they need. As a department, we have become more proactive in recognizing and giving correct access to the data the end-users need.

With continuous file versioning, the way our data is backed up allows us to recover quickly if some of our data is compromised by a ransomware attack. We can simply revert back to a different point in time before that attack took place and make that data available to our end-users. That makes things much easier for us and gives us one less thing to worry about.

In addition, with continuous file versioning, there are some tools in Nasuni to very quickly help us restore a file that's been deleted or corrupted, back to a time where it was not deleted or corrupted. We have that functionality in the NMC and we can restore a file in just a few minutes.

Another benefit is that Nasuni has helped to eliminate infrastructure significantly. About 90 percent of our jobs are scenarios where we're onsite building a building or a stretch of highway and, for those jobs, we have saved on hardware costs and have not had to purchase a server. Instead, we have been able to access other edge appliances within the company. We can utilize existing hardware and don't need to buy new hardware for a particular job. That has certainly saved a lot of money on hardware, on the order of a few thousand dollars for the cost of a job-site server.

And that has made our infrastructure support efforts a lot more streamlined. It has reduced the soft costs, including the time the entire IT department spends on getting things up and running, and the time spent supporting users when a file gets moved or deleted and has to be restored to an earlier time.

We can also accurately forecast our costs for replacing the 10 percent of our Nasuni edge appliances that are on-prem, as needed. We know what to expect, how much life we can get out of them, and forecast when we will need to replace one. There is a need for hardware replacement, but that need has decreased. While we have established, internally, that we need to have that on-premises machine, we have virtualized many of our Nasuni edge appliances going forward, minimizing that hardware footprint that we have to manage.

From an agility perspective, our onsite people who are building something have the ability to access their data from any location and they can go back to the data for jobs they previously worked on. An end-user can be starting up a new job and, at the same time, can close out a job that was run somewhere else. Nasuni gives them that flexibility, making them more productive from one location. In addition, many of our end-users work at multiple locations and may be in five different locations from Monday to Friday. They're able to access all the data they need from those different locations and that is definitely a part of what they need to be successful.

One of the things we find most valuable is how quickly we can restore a deleted file. An unexpected byproduct of this feature is the ransomware protection that Nasuni provides as well. 

Another helpful feature, in addition to restoring a file that was deleted within 24 to 48 hours, is that we have the ability to restore a file or a folder that was deleted, going all the way back to the inception of that file or folder. That means we actually have unlimited backups to the inception point of data with Nasuni.

In addition, Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. That's important to our company because, as a construction company, we are often building where nothing else exists. We may be adding a new stretch of highway, or replacing a stretch of highway in a remote area, or building a water treatment plant in a remote, desolate area where one doesn't exist. The ability to give our end-users their data, safely and securely, is huge. When we are informed of a new job that we have to work on, we can usually get that project management team up and running with access to their data within three to four hours. For our transient workforce, where people are at a location for 12 months or 24 months and then move, having the ability to move to a new location and access new data, as well as old data to close out an old job, is critical to the way that our workforce gets the job done.

One area that we've recently spoken to Nasuni about is single sign-on.

Another is integrating Nasuni with Azure Active Directory. In our particular case, that would allow for third-party consultants to access our Azure Active Directory environment as opposed to coming to our on-premises environment. 

Nasuni is aware of these issues which are something of a wishlist for us, and we hope they will work on them sooner rather than later.

I have been using Nasuni for 10 years.

Nasuni has developed a good product that is secure and allows our end-users the flexibility they need to access their data. We're very confident in Nasuni and in what they provide. We're hopeful that they can continue to stay up with the times, but we're completely comfortable with the stability and the footprint that they've created in the data storage field.

The product was built and designed to be scalable. We can add on new devices, new edge appliances, in less than a day, whether they are physical or virtual devices. The fact that we can do that quickly is really helpful in our environment. If we need to scale down, we can do that as well and move our end-users to a different edge appliance to access data when their primary one is being decommissioned or needs service. The scalability is definitely an asset of Nasuni.

We have about 3,500 to 4,000 employees and all of them are users of Nasuni. They include everyone from upper management and ownership, all the way down to people in the field and college interns at our job sites who help us complete the projects we're working on. Everyone in our company accesses that data.

We increase our storage by 10 to 20 percent every year. Data storage is a growing need in our company. I don't see that increase in storage diminishing any time soon.

We require two people for maintenance of Nasuni. They do things such as building a new edge appliance and monitoring for and implementing new version installations. They restore files that have been deleted or moved and work with our vendor when it comes to licensing renewal and when we need to purchase physical hardware. They are also the main point of contact for opening support tickets if an issue arises.

I give their tech support a 10 out 10. They're great.

This is the first vendor that has helped us with all our data storage. Before, we did all that internally.

We have a license that we renew annually and we recently renewed about 250 terabytes of data. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

If a colleague at another company told me they have concerns about migration to the cloud, I would say Nasuni has put a great deal of effort into simplifying and streamlining the migration process. We did not go through that, as our process was a little bit unique when we moved our data over to Nasuni. But in the years that I've been working with Nasuni, I have seen them put a lot of time and effort into streamlining that process to move data from an existing storage solution over to their cloud data storage solution.

When it comes to the migration, the amount of time you put into preparing and organizing your data will make that transition smoother and more efficient. If your source data is permissioned properly and the overall hierarchy is as organized as it can be before you move it, that will make that process significantly easier. Also make sure that end-users are accessing the data they need to access. Put time and effort into making sure that is correct, as opposed to making it a "Wild West" and giving everyone access to everything.

We have multiple use cases. We have a lot of user data from users who share Excel files, Word files, et cetera. It is often used for their home directories, for Windows, and their folders and shared folders.

We also use it for test data.

And at remote sites where there are SQL backups, we'll dump those backups into it to get them offsite, because it's mirrored to AWS.

We also have users with multi-protocol files. They run CE solvers and the results get transferred to Nasuni and then they can get to them from wherever they are.

Nasuni has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single, global file system. Once the data is in Nasuni and the users are using it, we don't have to worry about updating Windows File Servers anymore. We don't have to worry about disparate methods of access, where people are asking, "Where is this file server? Why can't I get to it?" It makes operations easier.

And the ease of backups is even more important than that, knowing data is protected. We used to chase down file servers everywhere, but now we don't have to worry about that.

Another one of the biggest benefits is the resiliency. Nasuni means our users have more uptime. We have a lot of little plants and we would often hear from them, "Oh, the file server here is down." There might only be five guys there, but now that happens way less often. It just runs. The reliability, for the users, is big.

And the Continuous File Versioning means that recovery from ransomware would be way faster. Fortunately, we haven't had any ransomware attacks since bringing up Nasuni, but in the cases where we've had to restore files for people, it's so fast that we know that if there were a ransomware attack, it would be the same situation. Also, this feature has alleviated concerns about timely backups and restores. It's affected our operations by giving us more confidence that everything is protected.

In addition, the users are always ecstatic when we show them that they can get something back themselves and that they can go to the one from yesterday or a week ago. They love it.

Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure and that has been a cost-leveler. The overall cost is lower.

But the biggest thing is that we don't have to worry about budget cycles so much anymore. Instead of having to deal with spending a million dollars every five years, it's just a monthly bill now. It just runs. In terms of cash flow, compared to buying fixed assets through a hardware refresh, it has made things a lot easier to predict. It also simplifies infrastructure purchasing and support requirements, lowering the cost and allowing us to centralize things more.

The most important feature is that things are backed up automatically in AWS. We have a lot of remote sites where there is a tiny server onsite and, in a lot of cases, we really don't have to back them up because the data is automatically copied to AWS. The cloud replication is the most useful functionality for us.

In terms of file storage capacity, it enables us to provide it anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. We just tell the users it'll cost you a little bit for every file, and go for it. They don't have to control it anymore. That's very important because it makes budget cycles easier. We, in IT, don't have to get involved in that anymore. We hand it off and say, "Okay, you guys are getting a bill every month," and we don't have to think about it.

The performance monitoring could be improved.

I have been using Nasuni for about 18 months.

We have a very good impression of the stability, so far.

The scalability is also very good. We haven't hit any brick walls. Almost everybody in our company, and we have thousands of employees, uses it in some way. They might not know that they're using it, but their files are on it.

The technical support is very good. It's definitely one of the better support teams that I've had to deal with.

Positive

We did not have a similar product. We used Windows plus VMware plus EMC storage. Now, we have a single server with a filer. It didn't really replace anything directly but you could say it replaced Windows File Servers.

Deployment required two guys over a long period of time. At this point, we have five people who know it very well and maintain it.

There is a learning curve. The disadvantage is that it's a whole new thing. You can't interview for a Windows guy and then say, "Here you go. Take care of this file server." But once you know it, any one person can take care of way more data.

ROI is hard to talk about because it's apples to oranges. In some areas, we have definitely seen ROI. For example, in user productivity when they say, "I need this file from yesterday," and we can say, "We have it," as opposed to, "I'm sorry, all we have is last week," there is ROI. We have also seen it in terms of reducing backup licensing.

Use Nasuni for a project. Pick a category, use it for that, and watch it for six months. Like a lot of cloud solutions, you don't really know what the ongoing costs of it, plus AWS, are. It's hard to determine what it will really cost you until you have used it and you see what the bills are. It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap.

Years ago we looked at NetApp and one other solution. After the evaluation, those solutions just weren't quite ready. They didn't quite do everything we wanted done.

Then, about two years went by and we decided to do another round and we picked Nasuni. It seemed mature enough at that point and we haven't really compared it to anything else since then. It's done the job.

If a colleague at another company said he had concerns about the solution's performance on the cloud, I would tell him that to achieve performance X, you can do it with less need for horsepower onsite with Nasuni. If you're replacing a solution, you don't generally need hardware upgrades to do it.

Overall, there isn't much missing from Nasuni. It's good stuff.

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.