What is our primary use case?
It's mostly for internal users. We use it for internal file sharing. We have moved our various departments, such as marketing, finance, and HR, to Nasuni. We started using it because of the StorSimple devices coming to an end of life. Microsoft announced that, so we considered Nasuni as the first option for internal file sharing of users.
It's on the cloud, but we started on-prem. We borrowed the filer from Nasuni themselves and completed the migration just to speed up the process, and then we sent the filer back. We are now completely on the cloud backed up by AWS.
We are using its latest version. We did the update two weeks ago to the latest version that we received from them.
How has it helped my organization?
Snapshot backup has been a lifesaver. It sometimes used to take us close to five hours to back up one spreadsheet for users because we were using physical file servers. We have not received any complaints from users regarding the performance or a connection or network not being available. It has been good so far.
Nasuni has also helped with data consolidation. It has improved our compliance and risk management with data consolidation. We have all our data in one place.
Nasuni has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. We are only using a single, global file system instead of the five physical servers that we had previously. It's really good. We started with this project because we wanted to do data migration because of the StorSimple issue, but then we found out that we could do data consolidation at the same time because it did support multi-site access. We now have all our data centralized in one place, which is very helpful and useful. At the time of considering and doing data redundancy, we will only have to do it on one site instead of multiple sites.
Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We were using five physical servers before. Instead of them advising us to buy a physical server to do the migration, they lent us one for free. We did our migration, and we sent it back to them, so that was a great call from them. We didn't even know that option was available. It was their sales team that suggested this. Otherwise, we would have ended up with one file server that we would not have been using. It would have been just on commission if we had to buy it ourselves.
Nasuni offers a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. We call it Nasuni Management Console. They do provide their own console for us to manage our data, which is a shift from the old way of managing our data. We used to have to physically log into the server and manage our data, but now, we manage it all in one place. It's quite an easy and straightforward process.
Nasuni doesn't provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. You would have to sign up with them, but you can always request or demand a capacity increase. You have to go through a process with them, but the customer support is quite fast, so you can request it and then get it applied within the same day. I'm not sure about unlimited, but I know that we're using 20 terabytes, and we're able to expand it if we want to. It's $850 per terabyte. We do need this capability to be able to expand because it's an internal file system. At some point, our security team might decide to do a backup of the data, and that will just double the size. We need to have on-demand storage capacity support because the company data is growing day by day, so we would always need it. We would need to request more storage from Nasuni in the next couple of months.
With the support that was provided for us, it was easy to configure the solution to support organizational changes. It wasn't very easy, but it was easy. They were with us every step of the way. With their support, it got quite easy for us. We expected it to be way more complicated than this. It did not affect our business in a bad way. There was hardly any downtime. We completed the data migration, and then we did the switch within five minutes to Nasuni filer. It affected our business in a good way that the users did not even feel the change. A lot of users did not even notice the changes until we told them. We had to tell them to change the path they were accessing or the directories they were accessing. That was the only way it affected users, but that's not just with Nasuni. It would have been with any other vendor.
Nasuni has also simplified infrastructure purchasing and support requirements. We no longer have to worry about buying physical equipment. In terms of its effect on the time and effort spent on infrastructure support, we will be able to measure that only after a year. Next year, we don't have to worry about backup. We don't have to worry about maintaining the devices or upgrading them to the physical ones or buying or renewing a license. Overall, it has helped a lot. It would be a great shift next year once we do the infrastructure budget again.
What is most valuable?
Snapshot backup is most valuable. It's quick and easy to use. It's controlled only by an administrator, which is very good. It takes 10 seconds to back up a spreadsheet of three or four megabytes.
What needs improvement?
It can be improved in terms of retention policy or data retention for the volumes. We found this quite frustrating because different departments in our organization require different retention policies. For instance, the finance team wants their data to be kept for seven years. It's a legal requirement, whereas the HR team needs it to be kept for 10 years. The marketing team only wants it for the next two years. Nasuni does not support different retention policies within the same volume, so you have to keep creating volumes for retention policies. When you create a new volume, it means you're starting from zero all over again. You can't move data between two volumes. You have to move them from your physical device to Nasuni or your cloud device to Nasuni. That has added a lot of time for us because we were not aware of that feature, but when we shared this with Nasuni, they said it's something they'll be working on in the next quarter.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started with it in November. We have been actively using it since November, but we started the process of migration in late August. It has been less than a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
So far, we haven't had any issues with them. It has been good so far. The stability has been good and on point.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Currently, we have around 400 internal users.
How are customer service and support?
Their support is very good. I'd rate them a nine out of ten. When we send an email, we get a response from them within the next three hours.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had StorSimple from Microsoft. We switched to Nasuni because StorSimple devices were coming to an end of life.
How was the initial setup?
It was straightforward because we got support from Nasuni every step of the way. There were two people involved in its deployment: myself and someone else.
It took us about two weeks between meetings and having an initial deployment. It would have taken one week if we were properly organized from our end as well because a lot of the staff were not available.
It has been a pleasure working with them. They have been one of the best vendors so far. They are quite good, and I just hope we can continue this with them.
What was our ROI?
It's too soon for that. In one year's time, we will be able to give a full financial overview of how much is saved in terms of costs.
When it comes to business agility and cash flow compared to buying fixed assets through a hardware refresh, with Nasuni, it's the way forward. It's not just Nasuni, it's with everything. It's the way forward for the infrastructure of any IT department to buy everything on the cloud.
We are trying to move everything to the cloud. It has saved us about five grand in the total overall project cost. In the long run, it's going to reduce the carbon footprint as well. At this time, it's hard to say whether it has decreased capital costs. This kind of feedback would be possible in about a year's time because we've paid for the initial project. We paid for the S3 bucket on AWS, so our cost is quite high, but we will be able to evaluate the cost next year. We had to pay for everything at once, and we have been using it for less than a year. Next year, the cost will be very, very low because we don't have to renew the S3 bucket anymore. We've already bought a few years of reservation with them.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate Azure Files and AWS as well, but the costs were quite high for both of them. They did not meet the security requirements, whereas Nasuni met the security requirements we had.
What other advice do I have?
Do a cleanup before you get the initial cost. Do the data cleanup. Because we didn't clean our data properly, it came out to be 20 terabytes. We ended up using about 12 terabytes, but we had already signed the contract with Nasuni. This is no fault from Nasuni's end; it's from our end. So, organize your data, clean it up, and then request the quotation from Nasuni.
Any infrastructure team that wants to move to this solution should clean their data and consider retention policies. These are the two lessons we've learned from using this solution. Check with different departments because apparently, every department has its own retention policy. We found this the hard way.
To someone who has concerns about migration to the cloud and about the solution’s performance, I would say that we had the same concern, but four months in with Nasuni, we did not receive a single complaint from the users, whereas with our previous solution, we had filers at the same physical location where the users were based, but we used to get a lot of complaints about the performance and stability. I would recommend testing it out and reading the reviews about it.
In terms of our cloud strategy, we only have snapshots and backups. We have an active backup, which was advised by Nasuni anyway, and we applied a few retention policies as well on some of the files. This is the strategy we currently have. We will be considering redundancy, but because of the cost, we will just put that on hold until next year.
We have not used Nasuni for data protection. It was just a budget issue from our security team. They already had data protection with other vendors, and they will wait for that contract to finish.
We have not used the Access Anywhere feature, but we are considering it. We had a meeting with them last week regarding Access Anywhere. We haven't yet had an in-depth conversation with them. We have also not used the Continuous File Versioning feature or add-on services.
Overall, I'd rate Nasuni an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.