Nasuni Reviews

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. 

Our use case at the moment is for our file storage for all our London offices. It's for our London editorial teams, our London business units, and also our college.

We tend to keep it up to date in terms of the version. We're pretty much only a week or so behind a certain release because we know how easy the upgrade process is and we also know how successful the upgrades are. We've never had to roll back any upgrades. We've never experienced any issues with the upgrade process. So, we always keep it on its latest and greatest.

We're currently only using it in our London offices. We have our backend storage, which is AWS at the moment. It's about 100 terabytes of S3 storage, and in front of the S3 storage, we have three physical filers. Two of them are in our London offices and one is in our colocation data center. We have a virtual filer as well, which is running on our Nutanix hypervisor. 

It's pretty much all cloud. The on-premise is pretty much just a cache. They're just filers. They're just for the speed. We're a media and publications house. So, we need our files quite close to us so that we have a cache of those files, and our editors can access those files quickly and responsively.

When we purchased it years ago, we could only get it on Azure, but because we are 99% AWS, it was better that we moved over to have our costs in line with our other AWS spend.

It replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. The main reason for purchasing Nasuni at the time was that it took out so many tiers of other technologies that we were running at the time. We had on-premise file servers. We had virtual file servers, and we had replication going from three or four different sites and that replication was going to colocations. We had tape backups. We had physical backup storage. There were multiple vendors we had to deal with. We had multiple contracts. We had outer support, hardware, and software. By bringing in Nasuni, which was pretty much full cloud-based technology, we managed to remove heaps and heaps of infrastructure, and management as well. Previously, the management was like a day job of checking backups and checking the replications running and things like that. They weren't even replicating over to the other side. Nasuni changed all of that. We were instantly making one copy straight to the Cloud, and it was available and protected. It was definitely very important for us. It was probably our biggest project at the time. It fitted perfectly into our disaster recovery process and plan. It was something simple to work with, and we didn't have to deal with those workloads. 

Some of the benefits were obviously the cost savings from not having to manage and have so much infrastructure in our colocations. Our editorial teams felt secure knowing that we had forever backups of their files. We have to have multiple copies of our publications, files, photography, and things like that, and whenever we've spoken to the departments about how secure their data is, we just tell them, "Things are never going to get lost here. We've got multiple copies. It's forever."

It offers a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. Having the dashboard or a single pane of glass means that you're not moving between different management GUIs. It's very important that everything you need to know and see is there.

It provides file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on demand, and without limits. We pay for a set amount, but there have been times when we've gone over that amount, and we've continued to work. We just spoke to our account manager and we could spin up more data. Our invoice changes because we're using up more storage, but it's there on-demand, and we use as little and as much as we like.

It's easy to configure it to support organizational changes. We have changed. Our organization has changed over time, and we've continued to make changes to the product. Although Condé Nast is a global company, we were working as 12, 13 different entities in that company. We've now merged all our offices together, which meant more people wanted access to UK data. We've now got people from the US, India, European countries, and all other areas of the globe accessing that data. It was simple to make configuration changes so that those users could access the data via their domain or via their active directories.

It does continuous file versioning for us. The files are always protected in AWS S3, and they're also protected from ransomware, which I believe Nasuni guarantees. It's not something that we configure or switch on. It's just something that's been mentioned to us by the account managers.

There is snapshot retention. There are snapshot schedules that you can set on each share or file level. You can set up whatever level you want to set for the schedules. We sometimes have our scheduling done once an hour, so we can make changes back to an hour. There are forever snapshots from day one of a file appearing.

It has increased our productivity knowing that we can restore things in an instant. We've never had any complaints from any users about bringing back the wrong type of files or not being happy with a file that we've brought back.

It has helped eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We had a number of physical file servers and physical storage and backup infrastructure, and it was also the same in our colocation where we were replicating our entire infrastructure. We managed to remove tons of on-premise hardware and virtual machines just because we could install Nasuni. In terms of the effect of this reduced infrastructure footprint on our costs, one of our higher costs would've been the rack space at our colocation. That's a massive cost reduced from our monthly outgoings.

It has simplified infrastructure purchasing and support requirements. We have a single provider for our file storage and file backups. It has simplified purchasing and management. It has enabled us to be more proactive with other projects. We don't have to manage all that old infrastructure. It has enabled us to move forward.

It's a lot simpler and more cost-effective as compared to buying fixed assets through hardware refresh.

I particularly like the restore process. Our financial teams make changes to spreadsheets and other files, and we've got teams using Photoshop files. They make mistakes and need to recover files, and we can do that instantly. We also have users who manage to delete folders, and we can bring them back instantly within a few seconds.

Knowing that it's all protected from ransomware is also a very big advantage at the moment with the number of ransomware attacks that you see out there. Nasuni is being very protective of that, which is quite good to hear. There were times when we had to replace the filers we've had issues with, and because we know all our data is protected in AWS, we could just turn them off and spin them up. As quickly as in an hour or so, we were back working with zero downtime. That area of functionality is really good.

In terms of ease of management, it's the easiest one you can use. It's very simple. It's very easy to set up, very easy to configure, and very easy to manage.

The customer portal could be improved, but it has been a while since I've used it. They might already have improved it.

We probably started using Nasuni in 2016 or 2017. That was when we first started purchasing filers and backend storage. Initially, it was with Azure Storage, and then we easily migrated over to AWS, which helped streamline our costs and things like that.

Its stability is very good. We don't have any issues, and we never had any issues.

Its scalability is very good. You can scale forever.

It is being used extensively. In terms of our plans to increase its usage, it depends on whether it's on the roadmap and it fits into our strategic vision. It was being used only in the UK, and now, we've got other products being used globally elsewhere. 

We use their technical support quite often. I would rate them a nine out of ten for their technical response.

Positive

Before Nasuni, we were using a number of products. We were using Windows File Servers. We were also using DPM for backup and replication. We were also using another tool called Double-Take for replication. We were then using tape drives. We had a lot going on. We switched because we wanted one platform.

I configured and set it up myself, and I found it very easy and simple. It took a few hours.

We set it up in-house. In terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight. We have a maintenance vendor once a month or once every other month. The upgrade process is very simple. It's very easy to follow. With one click, you can watch Nasuni do its work.

I wouldn't know, but I would guess that we have seen an ROI.

Its pricing can get a tad expensive. When we first took Nasuni out, we were just paying for the service. We got storage at a reduced rate. It has now changed, and they're now more of an all-in-one type of thing. It can be quite expensive, but it works out. Apart from that, licensing-wise, it's very simple.

We did a comparison with a few other products, but I can't remember which ones they were. 

My advice to others looking into implementing Nasuni is to go for it. It's very simple to set up, very simple to configure, and easy to manage. Its performance is very good. It's very simple, and you just know it works. Migration-wise, we've migrated 100 terabytes to it with no problem. It's a really good product.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

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.

We use the solution for file sharing, redundancy, and restore features. 

Regarding cloud strategy, we use a bucket in the cloud, but it's all private, so nothing public hits it. We have elements including the bucket, a filer, and an MC component; it's all there but only accessible from within. Part of our strategy when deploying filers and locations is to ensure firewalls are set so that traffic never exits; it's technically the internet, but we use a private IP, so no data travels over.  

Nasuni hasn't replaced any other solutions; we use it side-by-side and implement it at new sites. We're an extensive organization, so we can't just replace tools; it would take a very long time, and the initiative would have to be of great importance. Much money and work would go into replacing products, including storage requirements, buying a filer and spooling it up, and all the associated activity across multiple sites.

It's relatively straightforward to configure the solution to support organizational changes; Nasuni provides the required TCP and UDP ports. The product has its requirements, but they're easy to meet. When we harden the tool, this gets harder, but the actual Nasuni conditions are manageable.  

The product has a lot of zero-touch operation, which is good; we don't have to intervene too much except for updates, which is somewhat annoying. 

One of Nasuni's best characteristics is its fully redundant system; we don't have to shift tapes or use other backup solutions. It's a good, full-featured product.

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits, which is essential for a global file storage solution. 

The solution provides Continuous File Versioning, positively affecting our ability to recover from ransomware or a disaster. We can roll back using protected snapshots, and we may lose some data, but how much depends on when the snapshot was taken and what's affected by the event.  

Continuous File Versioning also positively impacts a user if they delete a file or a file becomes corrupted. We can resurrect the file any time after its creation, based on our policies. For example, every volume can have a different retention policy, with backup increments every ten minutes.  

Sometimes, there are too many updates; recently, Nasuni flagged a virus incorrectly, and there was an update to fix that. This is not good in a production environment, so the solution isn't as mature or stable as needed.

The privilege settings need to be more granular, and alerts are an excellent example. If a user doesn't have access to them, they can't see them and access information such as what they may have done wrong, what's there, and when the last sync happened. However, the ability to view alerts also comes with permission to delete them, which is not good, so we need more customization options here.  

There are a few little functions that Nasuni can do for us, but we can't do for ourselves, and it shouldn't be that way. We should be free to customize what we want, and Nasuni should provide the commands or a place in the GUI to do it.

We've been using the solution for about a year. 

The solution is stable; the S3 bucket isn't going to break down, and we're on new servers running off a Linux kernel, so they shouldn't go down either. We have yet to experience any issues with the stability. 

The product is very scalable. I do wish we could throw more master volume owners on one device, as it's limited to 16 or eight if it's user-facing.

We contact customer support weekly, and the company representative who deals with us is excellent; he knows what he's talking about. They run through details with us and regularly teach us about the product. We can ask many questions, and Nasuni is more like an automatic transmission car than a manual, which is as it's supposed to be.

Before Nasuni, we used traditional Microsoft tools and didn't necessarily switch. It's more of a slow upgrade process; we use Nasuni for all newer sites and will continue to do so going forward.

The initial deployment is relatively straightforward; the only complexity comes from our internal rules around traffic flow and quality of service, but Nasuni itself has nothing to do with that. The server comes pre-configured, we do the volume, it's without glitches, and connecting to the NNC is fine.

The last two deployments I worked on took almost six months for a full deployment. It's important to remember we are a massive company, so much waiting is involved, and things take time. If someone wants to spool up a VM here, it could take months for that to happen; this is a very controlled environment, we can't afford mistakes, security is tight, and many checks and balances exist.

We evaluated other options, but I was not involved in the process. We looked at many products, including Commvault and online tools, as there are a lot of choices when it comes to backup and recovery, incremental backup, and file-sharing solutions. Ultimately, our requirement was for a product that could be solely internal and would not go over the internet, so Nasuni fit the bill.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Nasuni's analytics connector provides analytics, including what data is flowing. We can access that locally and in the cloud from wherever the filers are.

Regarding data protection, we use the solution's built-in antivirus but not exclusively; we also have other tools to scan the data. We have it as an extra layer of protection, but otherwise, secure files as we usually would.

We use Nasuni Access Anywhere, but we may not need it. As we use an SD-WAN solution, Nasuni tacked a CNAME on the device so we can access the shares. Therefore, we can use both of those.

Regarding simplicity of management, I'm not involved in the daily management, but I suspect it isn't as glitchy as Oracle ZFS. ZFS is horrible; it works, but good luck fixing it if it breaks. Nasuni is probably better because it's a newer platform built on a Linux kernel.

If we didn't have Nasuni, we would instead have some kind of file server, attached storage maybe with a RAID, and then push that to AWS in a blob or S3 bucket. We could do much of what Nasuni does in other ways, but it would be more complicated; it would be less clean and easy. Having a unified platform to handle everything is much better. Regarding hardware elimination, the solution doesn't really do that; we could eliminate the hardware, but that leads to other problems and is less cost-effective.  

In terms of cloud migration, I've done lift and shift projects, and I was more involved in the management side. I've also been involved in Azure projects, including AAD, hybrid AD, and some Intune rollouts.  

To a colleague at another company who has concerns about migration to the cloud and the solution's performance, I would say the performance is related to your WAN, hardware, and user demands; it's not the product that will limit you. Regarding the cloud concerns, your data is safer in the cloud; I've never heard of a company losing their data in an S3 bucket due to an Amazon mistake, for example.  

To those considering implementing the solution, I recommend you have your infrastructure properly set up before, depending on the security requirements. Putting the solution in a VLAN and the filer in a different VLAN is a consideration. I also recommend buying enough storage for future capacity, testing the data, and not skimping on storage; it's better to lean toward generosity here. For product-specific advice, I recommend being prepared for some learning; taking the time to learn how Nasuni works and how to support it post-deployment is essential. As with everything, it will take a little time, a few months or so, so be prepared for an investment of time and planning.

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 use Nasuni to provide local access to files with data stored in the cloud, so we don't have to worry about backups. It offers fast access to the data and supports multi-site configuration. Nasuni allows us to collaborate across five or six sites using the same data set.

We have probably 600 filers deployed predominantly on-site, and the rest are primarily on a public cloud. However, we still have 20 filers on a private cloud. We use Nasuni on Azure and AWS, but we mostly work on AWS and have Clever Safe for our private cloud. Nasuni supports everything, including Azure, VM, GCP, and private cloud. It works on any cloud that supports S3.

Nasuni allowed us to replace a significant number of Windows File Servers with a single global system, and it gives us on-demand file storage capacity. It's essential. On a scale of one to ten, I would say it's probably a nine in terms of importance to our operations.

We can also use it with VDI environments, which is somewhat important. It creates a centralized repository every VDI workstation can access. We don't have to worry about how we present storage on each one.

it's solid and does a great job from a management perspective. However, its data propagation was pretty low when we first started using it, especially for the multi-site capabilities. For example, if site A accessed data site B, it took a while for them to get the updated version of that same data. They have vastly sped up data propagation and improved snapshot performance. 

The most valuable feature is Nasuni's multi-site capabilities. Another beautiful thing about Nasuni is centralized management. We can see all our storage and manage it from a single pane of glass. It's definitely a lot better than Windows and NetApp. We have a bunch of NAS, so you have to manage each one as a separate silo. That was much more painful.

The continuous file versioning is top of the line. We can do snapshots of up to five-minute increments. The ransomware protection is also great, and we can roll back a version from any snapshot at any point in time. It has the ability to do end-user recovery, or a user can simply contact an admin who can perform a recovery from the management console. The versioning has simplified everything. Now we don't have to worry about those components.

We've had some organizational changes that Nasuni has not been able to keep up with, mainly from a data or file system perspective. Moving a filer from one management console has been a challenge. It lacks the flexibility to move files in and out of the management console. We have six management consoles now, and we're constantly telling Nasuni, "Hey, please allow us to move a filer from management console A to B." They can't do that.

I'd like to see Nasuni add the ability to search and access your data when your users are remote from the system. 

We've had Nasuni for about eight years.

Nasuni is highly stable.

Nasuni scales to what a single piece of hardware can scale to, and it allows multi-site functionality. However, it could get a little complicated in a scenario where I have an extreme concentration of users. Everyone in our company is using it, so it's around 80,000 users in roles across the board, from finance and creative to business and IT. 

I rate Nasuni's support 10 out of 10. Their support is great. They not only help you with their solution but also often help with issues that aren't even related to them. For example, if an Active Directory server is having issues, they'll help point us to the solutions that help us from an agency perspective.

Positive

We were predominantly using Windows File Servers. We mainly switched to Nasuni to increase our company's agility by enabling cloud-based storage utilization.

It's straightforward we provisioned an S3 bucket and deploy a management console. You only need to deploy the filers after that. It took a couple of weeks to deploy and several years to finish migrating all of our data 

We did it everything in-house, and we have probably 20 people worldwide managing it, which is pretty modest compared to the solution's scale.

Nasuni reduces our expenditures and makes them much more predictable. We don't have to buy as much storage because we can scale up in the cloud if we have a spike in business. Nasuni reduced our overall storage footprint at our sites by 70 to 80 percent. The vast majority of our infrastructure isn't related to our file servers, but it has greatly reduced our need for file-server architecture.

In most cases, it enabled us to completely eliminate our backup architecture, which costs nearly as much as the primary storage. It simplifies everything because we don't have to worry about IOPs and storage. We just keep it all in the cloud. 

It also allowed collaborative features we never had before, so we didn't need to invest in a third-party solution.

Nasuni is competitive with any other solution on the market. You have to pay for object storage and the cost of the backend object storage, which is where your data will actually reside. You also have to pay for filers and the hardware to run the filers themselves. However, those costs are pretty nominal compared to what we were previously paying in total storage.

We evaluated everything, including NetApp, Panzera, etc. We looked at 20-plus solutions, and Nasuni beat them all. The advantages include flexibility and fast access to files in branch offices while retaining a single source of truth for our storage in the cloud. It allows us to scale by putting as many filers on multiple sites as needed. 

One disadvantage is the strict rules on the filers. Also, it can only be managed from one NMC, and you can't change it. The lack of search has always been a major con for our company, too.

I rate Nasuni 10 out of 10. The hybrid cloud concept is Nasuni's bread and butter. It's good for anyone who wants to migrate to the cloud but maintain fast local access to their storage. 

My advice to anyone deploying Nasuni is to study the best practices carefully, especially if you have a Macintosh workstation. It's important to follow them closely to avoid performance issues. Study the knowledge base articles to learn how to set your POS correctly and use adequately sized filers.

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. 

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.