Nasuni Reviews

It is mainly used for file storage.

I belong to the administration part of the storage team who use it to handle all the file servers and the SAN storage. I manage a team who handles the day-to-day tasks of Nasuni. We have multiple teams who take care of our work on the Nasuni. There is a separate team who works on deployment and another separate team who handles the BAU tasks. So, we have different teams who work on different parts.

Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We were using about eight to 10 different types of vendors or small storage boxes for provisioning and shared access for users. We got rid of all those. That has eliminated the footprint and operational overhead at our data center. We don't have to worry about any hardware or monitoring particular devices, and hundreds of devices have been decommissioned. Now, for provisioning, everything is on Nasuni. I assume this has made a big difference in costs.

It is without limit. It grows per the need. In one year, I haven't seen anybody requesting any new spaces yet.

We use the Continuous File Versioning feature. Restoration is quite simple. Because of Continuous File Versioning, there are any number of snapshots available with the settings that we have chosen. There is always a backup ready, and all we have to do is find a previous one that is ready to be recovered.

Previously it was a tough job working on hardware, volumes, shares, or anything that was managed by us. Now, it is the same task, but the ease with which we do it is better with Continuous File Versioning. All we have to do is log into the console, find what needs to be recovered, and then use that for recovery.

The user-friendliness of its access needs improvement. When I log into the console, I see all the files that we handle globally. There are hundreds of Nasuni files that I can see on the console, but no way that I can filter them down. While this is a small thing, I need to scroll down and select the ones that I want. "Control F" doesn't work nor is there a dropdown menu that I can click on and select the ones that I want. 

There are some things that we are really looking forward to. For example, we recently had an issue related to the COW disk. Only the Nasuni back-end team can check and see which out of the LANs or volumes provision from ESX is exactly the COW disk. We don't have visibility into that. There are certain things that are only visible to the back-end team of Nasuni, but I feel that we should, as a user, also have visibility into it.

I have been using it for a year.

We haven't seen any kind of outages related to Nasuni. Stability-wise, it has been great.

We don't have to worry about scalability. 

At the moment, we are backing up or protecting about 10 to 15 terabytes. 

We plan to get every NAS box that we have off existing devices that are end-of-life and used for file provisioning. We plan to move those to Nasuni.

I would rate Nasuni support somewhere between eight or nine out of 10 because sometimes we face issues in getting support from Nasuni. For example, if I am running a P1, then I call up Nasuni support but don't get immediate support. We then have to wait until somebody gets back to us. When we get support, it is good, but waiting is the issue.

Before Nasuni, we had NAS file servers from different vendors, e.g., Dell EMC and NetApp. We also had small-time, consumer NAS boxes, like QNAP, Synology, etc. It was quite uncomfortable and tedious, as well as the toughest way, to monitor all these vendors with different technologies and features, just to provide a file share to the user. This is something that has been tremendously reduced since dealing with just Nasuni and nothing else.

It was a tedious process of getting a change approved, looking into the available space, whether the storage had enough space for provisioning additional space to be requested. It used to take probably a time window of anywhere between seven to 10 days, if there was space available on the existing storage. If not, then it was another task that would go for months to procure new storage to add in more capacity. Nasuni has eased our job because we don't have to worry about the user requests for additional space anymore.

When we had NetApp, we had more control of it from a hardware perspective, but there were a lot of negative aspects to it. 

With Nasuni, as an administrator, my life is easy. The only issue that we are currently dealing with is about some access or permission-related issues. There are a whole lot of issues that we do not even have to look into it anymore: 

• People are not getting back to us that they need more space. 
• People are not getting back to us to tell us if there are hardware failures that we need to fix. 
• They are not coming back to tell us that there are some hardware issues going on, which probably might affect the data, data integrity, or probably cause data loss. 

So, there are many other things that we are not even hearing about right now. It has greatly reduced the amount of issues that we have had from previous solutions.

I have heard that it is easy to configure the solution to support organizational changes.

My team doesn't get involved. We have a separate team who takes care of deployments.

Unless you know that you have something better, I would say, "Go for it," in regards to Nasuni.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10. 

We have one physical filer on-premises and six virtual filers.

Our primary use case is as a NAS service, and we use it for all of our companywide drives. It contains home drives, department drives, file sharing, etc. All of our end-users put their data on these drives.

Nasuni offers us file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits. We have not had any issues on the filers where we run out of cache space rapidly. This is important to us, especially at our remote offices where we are running virtual to filers. It's nice to know that there is enough storage there for end-users to download or cache as many files as they want, without filling up the filer and data being removed from the cache.

This product gives us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. I can look at all of our data and I have the ability to recover all of our data from a single console. Navigating our data is fairly simplistic and as far as the end-users are involved, it's nice to know that they can share data across multiple filers.

Nasuni has not eliminated our need for on-premises infrastructure, but it has certainly reduced it. Our whole NAS environment is much simpler and easier as far as updating and upgrading OS versions of Nasuni. The main point is that the ease of use of the product is great.

The most valuable feature is that we have redundancy in our data. It's nice to know that it is cached both locally on the filters, as well as stored on that cloud.

We take snapshots every 15 minutes and it's nice to know that we have many versions of our data backed up.

Nasuni recently implemented a health system for filers. However, it needs better visibility because it lacks data and an explanation, or reasoning as to why a particular filer may be unhealthy. Similarly, when we receive an error on a snapshot, a little more detail as to what failed in the snapshot, and why, would be helpful. Essentially, on the learning side, there is some room for improvement.

We began using Nasuni in the spring of 2017, just over four years ago.

This solution is very stable. Knock on wood, I don't think we've ever had any particular issues with our physical filer or with the virtual filers, and we've never really had any failures with our data not being available.

With respect to scaling, it's very easy to increase or decrease as you like. We are a construction company and we do have a couple of Nasuni desktop-size filers that we have deployed to job sites a couple of times. When they are done with the job site, we've decommissioned the filers and implemented them at other job sites.

Overall, it's very easy to scale. We currently have seven filers and our license is set at 25 terabytes. This is something that I do see increasing because right now, we're at 23. When our license next renews, which may be in December, we may decide to increase it by five or ten terabytes. I don't foresee us increasing the number of filers, although that could always change.

I work with the support fairly often and for the most part, it's pretty good. I have had a couple of instances where the technicians were not very reliable as far as waiting for them to get back to me. However, I won't say that they weren't helpful.

Overall, rating from a one to ten, I'd give them an eight or nine. Some of the technicians could be more responsive, which is an area for improvement in this regard.

In our environment, Nasuni has helped to replace multiple servers with a single global file system. Our old environment consisted of between nine and twelve servers, and now we're down to seven. The number has not drastically decreased but it is a lot simpler to use.

Our previous environment was an HP LeftHand solution, and when I started with the company, I knew nothing about it. I was learning on the fly. It worked, but it was very difficult to update to the latest OS version. Or, if I had to implement new firmware or things like that, it was a lot more difficult.

The primary reason we switched from our previous NAS environment was that it was five or six years old. It was somewhat difficult to manage, especially when it came to updating the hardware and the software, et cetera. Nasuni just makes the whole process easier. Updating the actual virtual and physical server or filer is basically a one-click operation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I worked with a Nasuni technician on the initial setup and it was very clear when it came to moving our data from the existing NAS environment to the Nasuni environment.

The time it took for the actual setup of the filers was pretty short, but getting all of the data into the Nasuni environment took longer. That depended solely on our side, as we needed to work with all of our departments to get their data transferred over. In total, it probably took us between three and four months to complete. The bulk of this had nothing to do with Nasuni.

The strategy was simply to get off of our old NAS environment and get all of our department data moved over to Nasuni. At that point, we also had it stored in the cloud.

There are two of us who maintain the environment, although it is primarily me. I have a coworker that will help occasionally when it comes to updating the filers in the environment. However, it is mainly me who takes care of it.

My manager at the time was the one who selected Nasuni and I wasn't part of the group that was selecting new environments or new products at the time. That was in the initial stages of my employment at the company.

That said, I don't remember us looking at a lot of other vendors when we were seeking to replace our NAS environment.

We are currently running Nasuni version 9.0.7 and are waiting to upgrade to version 9.3.3. It's available, we just have not upgraded yet.

If I had a colleague in another company who had concerns about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance in that area, I would tell them that the migration from our NAS environment to Nasuni was quite simple. I used Robocopy to copy our data from the existing environment to Nasuni and it worked well. It was just a matter of copying the data to our physical filer and then it would automatically take snapshots and send them to the cloud. For me, overall, it was quite simple.

When we first started, they had a different migration tool and I don't think it worked as well as we wanted it to. They may now have a new tool that works better than Robocopy.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it works great. It does what we need it to do and the process of administering it is very simple through the Nasuni Management Console. I would recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using it as shared storage so that our users can share data between multiple departments.

We used to have different storage platforms for different regions, but using Nasuni we can actually use one storage platform for our customers who are at different locations so that they can share data. We now have a single global file system. That is really important from both the financial and the maintenance perspectives. We don't need to engage multiple engineers when things are done by a single product.

And the Continuous File Versioning has enabled us to meet our SLAs with our customers. We can deploy snapshots as frequently as we want to match our SLAs.

Continuous File Versioning is one of the best features because it helps you to restore at any point in time. That means you don't have to worry about a ransomware attack. Even if that attack happens, you can restore all the data to five minutes ago and save everything. That restore feature is the most valuable. You can restore in seconds. 

Also, the ability for sharing between multiple regions is important.

Nasuni is not SOC 2 compliant and it needs to be.

Another issue, because it's a cache-based mechanism in the cloud, is that while it keeps some files in cache and some files in the cloud, it doesn't tell which files are in the cache.

In addition, there is no reporting feature available, so we have to generate manual reports of the folder utilization.

It also doesn't have monitoring solutions. They want to do the monitoring of Nasuni using TIV stack, but implementing that takes a lot of time. For every single new filer, I have to deploy the alerting dashboard.

I've been using Nasuni for six months.

The stability is good. I have not seen any issues with its stability.

It's scalable but it's not easy to scale. It's not that simple to manage because it involves size-wise expansion. If we have to add more customers, we have to deploy more filers and that takes time and is not that simple to do. You will end up having some overloaded filers and some filers without load. The scaling process is not good and they don't have any tools to help us scale, so it's trial and error.

It takes at least an hour or so to deploy a new filer, which is a really bad thing. Because it's on the cloud, you should be able to do it in five minutes, but that doesn't happen with Nasuni.

We are currently using it extensively. We have about 20 appliances and we are planning to deploy 10 more in the future.

Customer support is good. Priority-two tickets and lower are handled by customer support via email. I have only had to use the email support so far.

Positive

We were using ZFS Storage but we replaced it with Nasuni. We switched because of the capacity constraints. We needed more capacity and there was a limitation with the ZFS Storage.

It is difficult to configure Nasuni. Adding a filer is an easy task, but deciding where to add them, how many to add, and what size to add takes a lot of time. I have to analyze my existing storage to understand how many users are going to access which folders. I have to design the Nasuni architecture accordingly.

The initial deployment took four to five hours.

I had to deploy multiple Nasuni edge appliances onto the cloud, in the different regions, and then join them with Azure Blob Storage.

We deployed it with the help of Nasuni employees.

We have only had Nasuni for six months so I cannot say that I have seen any cost savings. Even if it doesn't necessarily cost that much, the Azure Ultra Disks are costly.

Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low.

We evaluated SoftNAS and Azure NetApp Files before opting for Nasuni.

The advantages of Nasuni are the cost and better restore capabilities when compared to the other products. The drawbacks of it are the implementation and designing of the architecture. 

If you don't have multiple users or if performance is not a key for your deployment, go for Nasuni storage. In those circumstances it is good. But if you need performance with less latency, you should go with another solution.

We primarily use Nasuni as a file server. It is an enterprise cloud gateway.

Nasuni has helped to replace multiple data silos with a single global file system. Through digital transformation, Nasuni has helped us centralize and then normalize one solution for all, rather than having silos everywhere. This is important primarily when it comes to information security. This is my concern because I'm the global business information security officer for the company. Nasuni provides us and our clients with some assurance that we can secure the data properly, in addition to having resiliency.

This product provides a single platform with a 360-degree view of our data, which is important to us because, with all of the regulations introduced in the world, such as GDPR, we need visibility of the data. Nowadays, one of the most important things is having visibility of your data and being able to classify it properly. You need to be able to secure it. You also need to know exactly where it is because regulators and clients have the option to audit us if they decide. Without knowledge of where our data is, we can easily fall victim to a hacker or have issues with regulators. 

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits, although it's subject to licensing.

With the help of Nasuni, we have been able to reduce our on-premises infrastructure. This includes both virtual and physical infrastructure. We have been able to do so because it consolidates storage into one appliance, which is connected to the cloud.

The most valuable feature is that it provides single-point connectivity to our cloud storage and at the same time, it helps to keep our data secure.

Nasuni is fairly simple to manage and there haven't been many issues with it. In comparison to any other solutions that we are using, it was a big difference. It is significantly better than our previous solutions, in terms of providing a simple, high-level overview.

We use Nasuni's continuous file versioning feature and it fully protects us. With the ability to version files and have continuous recovery, it helps in terms of resiliency. If we have an incident then we would be able to easily recover from it by using the technology.

If a user accidentally deletes a file or one becomes corrupted, the continuous file versioning allows us to easily recover it. It has significantly improved our ability to recover files and in that space, it has helped us to improve our restorative IT operations. We have been able to take away legacy solutions and bring backups to the next level.

We would like to have a user desktop agent to help improve the end-user experience. They had a legacy agent but do not currently have the capability. This is something that we have been working with Nasuni on and are looking forward to.

We have been using Nasuni for between five and seven years.

We use it quite extensively, globally within the organization, and stability-wise, we have not had many problems. The earlier versions did present some issues but as new updates were released, it was improved and all of the issues were rectified. 

The solution is highly scalable.

The technology is easy to deploy. It's easy to scale in terms of connecting all of the Nasuni Cloud Gateways. It's self-explanatory.

Nasuni as a supplier is pretty responsive and provides us with all of the support we need. They have helped to resolve any issues that were occurring, pretty quickly.

There have been small shortcomings with support so it isn't perfect, although I don't think that any supplier I have dealt with has support that I would rate a ten out of ten. Ours involved the crossing of timezones.

Prior to this solution, between five and ten years ago, everyone was using physical appliances including physical servers. Everyone started shifting to the cloud and as we began to do the same, we found that Nasuni was the ideal solution.

We came up with a cloud-first strategy and started moving to the Cloud. With this, and because of our security and compliance requirements, it was the solution to implement at the time. This is why we chose it.

Implementing Nasuni was quite easy and it was not difficult to make the transition from our previous system. There were some challenges initially but they were resolved. We still work with Nasuni if there are any problems, but we don't have very many issues.

Overall, the implementation was quite straightforward and it was completed in a couple of months. Our strategy included migrating a lot of data to the cloud and it took a while because of the upload speeds.

The implementation was done in-house. We had the entire operations team involved. The executive technology people were involved as well, working with Nasuni. It was a sizable group of people involved in the implementation. 

We evaluated other options prior to implementing Nasuni. As the CSO, I can't speak to all of the reasons that we chose it. However, from a security point of view, it was the best solution at the time.

If one of my colleagues at another company had concerns about the migration to the cloud and the solution's performance then I would say that each solution has its own challenges. With Nasuni, it was quite smooth for us. There were some teething issues but that was at the beginning. When we first started with Nasuni, it was a very new product and we had some problems. At this stage, I am very confident that it wouldn't be a problem to migrate to the platform and use it.

In summary, this is a good product but there are still aspects that can be developed. An example is the desktop agent for users. Things can always be improved and made a little bit better.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Nasuni to replicate sensitive data from on-premise to the cloud.

We have a hybrid deployment. It is hosted by a company in the cloud, but it is not our company. 

It replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. It was important to have data in a central location where the information could be monitored, maintained, and audited. We needed a single point of reference for the data. We needed it in one central location to be able to replicate it to the cloud. Rather than having data spread out all over the place, we wanted it in one place so that everybody has one place to go and get it.

In terms of simplicity of management, previous processes had no management in place. However, Nasuni was very easy to set up and manage. Integrations with Active Directory made it even simpler. It is very easy to manage.

It is very easy to make changes to the system for organizational changes. It is easy to set up new shares, and it is easy to configure who has access to those shares. It is also easy to do some of the replications that are needed with the system. There are some things that are not easy to set up, but that's a specific use case for us. It is not necessarily what most people do.

We use Nasuni's Continuous File Versioning feature. If somebody accidentally deletes something, we have version history available for the file system. So, if somebody were to accidentally go out there and make a change to the wrong document, or go out there and actually delete the document, we have multiple versions of that file that we can recover from to restore it, which is good. So, there is some type of disaster recovery. 

We're saving manpower and man hours. People don't have to do so much individual-task work and side work. They can use this system. It is all connected to our network. It makes everything more efficient. Our workflows are more efficient. It saves our company probably six hours a week with all combined employees.

Its dependability and auditing capabilities are very important to us to be able to maintain a chain of custody of the information.

Its file-sharing capabilities via a web portal are huge to us.

Its interface design or the graphic user interface design can be slightly tweaked in some areas. Some built-in setup wizards would be very beneficial. Rather than having to go in and configure it by hand, there should be more setup wizards for onboarding new data shares and getting it set up the way you want. I don't know if these are on their roadmap, but I sat down and talked to them about some of the work concerns, some of the things that we liked, and some of the things that we didn't like. They are probably working on that.

I have been using this solution for about a year and a half.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability. In a year and a half, we've had one downtime. You can't give it a 100%, but it is 99.99999%. The way we've implemented it and have it running, it works. It is rarely down. Its uptime is wonderful.

We haven't really had to scale it, so that doesn't really apply to us, but I know the inherent operation of the system, and it is scalable to as big as you want it to go. Our environment is of a hundred terabytes. We have projected to increase its usage within the next five years.

Their support system is helpful and gets the job done, which is important to us. We haven't had to really use their support system because the system is just working the way it was designed, which is good for us.

Its initial setup was very complex. We are using Nasuni in a non-standard implementation. We are not using Nasuni the way it was designed to work out of the box. We decided to go with Nasuni because there was no solution on the market to do what we were trying to do. So, we worked and partnered with Nasuni to build a solution that fits our custom needs and the needs of many other companies, should they decide to go the same route.

Its deployment took two months. It was a pilot implementation. We had designed the system from the beginning and then implemented it. There was no real time frame or deadline. 

The Nasuni team was there for implementation. They were very knowledgeable of their product and of things that we needed answers to that were not their project. Their team that helped us implement was awesome. In particular, they had one guy with whom we worked. He just knew everything and was very smart when it came to software programming that was required on our side to implement the system. He was critical to the project's success. I called him a Wizard because he was very good with PowerShell commands. If we didn't have Nasuni's team working with us, it would have taken us a lot longer.

Their support during and after deployment was definitely a 10 star because they maintained contact with us. After we got everything deployed, they were available for answers and information to make sure everything was working. The system needed an update or something like that or had a couple of errors, and we reached out to them, and within 48 hours, they answered back on whether it was a concern or why it was happening. From the start to the fix, the whole thing took less than 48 hours. After we wrapped the project up and called it done, we haven't had to really use their support system because the system is just working the way it was designed.

We have slightly seen an ROI. We're not having to micromanage multiple data locations because it is all centrally located, so we don't have to buy that product anymore or that material anymore. For our use case, we had slight cost savings to hardware since implementing the system, but the amount of money that it is saving us time-wise is huge. That's the main reason we went with the solution. We can make everything more efficient.

I would not say it is economically priced, but it is affordable. If you can afford to pay for it, it is worth the money, but it is definitely not overpriced. It is priced about where it needs to be in the market. 

We were satisfied with the way they did their licensing and how they handled it. I believe they actually license by data size. It is based on how much data is being held on the machine and replicated, and that's completely understandable. So, for us, their pricing was as expected and affordable.

There are additional costs depending on how you set it up. If you want to host an on-premise solution, you've got to have the hardware to do that. If you deploy their solution in the cloud, you're going to pay more for it. If you host in your own personal cloud, there are costs associated with that.

I can't remember the name of the other company, but basically, we went to a test environment to try to set up the solution, but the company could not get it to do as we wanted it to do. So, we had to cancel the project with that company and find a different company.

To someone who has concerns about migration to the cloud and about Nasuni's performance in that area, I would say that there is no worry at all about using it. Nasuni's software does data replication. So, it takes the data that's on-premise and replicates it to another server or to the cloud. If you want an offsite backup and a stable solution that is affordable, you would have no worry whatsoever. This would be a highly recommended product to do that because that's what it is designed to do.

I would advise making sure that you've got everything planned out of what you want to move. Have a good project plan, and at the beginning, have all the data on the table of what you want to move to the cloud or what data you want to replicate from one point to another. As you set the system up, it is easy to go through and add more data entry points into that replication process, but it would be better to have that at the beginning and get it all set up from the beginning.

It can provide file storage capacity anywhere it is needed, on-demand and without limits, but we are not using Nasuni in that capacity. We have also not used Nasuni to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments.

It has not helped us in eliminating on-premises infrastructure. It has eased our concerns related to data recovery, but it has not affected our IT operation. We specifically put a certain type of data into the system that we knew that we could not lose, and we needed it replicated. The system has so far been doing an awesome job and working as advertised. We have things in place, and with other solution providers and whatnot, this one had to live in its own environment. Nasuni gave us its own environment where it could be replicated, but it has not affected our concerns about timely backups and restores or other areas of IT.

I'd have to give it a 10 out of 10 because we haven't had any issues, and the amount of technological experience and expertise that they brought to the table in our project was amazing. 

We use it for a couple of business units that need to quickly transfer data from the field to our offices. They run tests in the field and then they have to get that data uploaded quickly. They connect to the filers in our cloud, and that allows the data to snapshot across to all the Nasuni environments within our organization.

It's deployed through a combination of on-prem and cloud. It's more of a platform as a service or infrastructure as a service because we have hardware appliances that connect to our Azure infrastructure in the cloud.

When our field techs collect data from the units they're inspecting, that data is being uploaded and made visible on-demand. The way we're configured, those snapshots commit every five minutes. Within a five-minute window, based on bandwidth, that data will be available to any of the business units that are looking for it at our various locations.

Nasuni has definitely simplified our data management. Before we implemented it, we were struggling to figure out how to get data to different locations. It was a challenge. But the unified file system turned that into a very straightforward process. Everybody uploads their data to that directory structure and the data becomes available for everybody in all our locations.

Thankfully, we've never had a ransom attack, but the fact that we can restore data within that five-minute window, after each snapshot, has been extremely helpful. The continuous file versioning also makes recovery of a deleted file a very straightforward process through the NMC, the Nasuni Management  Console. One of the server administrators for Nasuni follows a few quick steps to restore that file. We've had to do that several times, and it has been a very straightforward process.

In addition, the snapshotting, which is our backup, has made Nasuni extremely easy when it comes to maintenance. It's a set-and-forget type of operation. With that snapshot continually running and always capturing the latest data, it's providing a backup at that point. It's very straightforward in terms of the impact on our IT.

The snapshot functionality and the unified file system are definitely the most valuable features for us. The UFS allows everybody across the organization to see the exact same data at the same time, instead of having different file servers with different structures on them, and that's mission-critical. We have different branches throughout our organization that have to act on that data. When it's uploaded to Nasuni and it's snapshotted out to all locations, each one does something specific with that data. It has to be consistent across the board, with multiple people accessing it. We have to make sure that everybody's on the same page.

I would like to see improvement in the training Nasuni provides. Compared to some of the other vendors out there, like Microsoft, where you can find how-to videos, Nasuni only has a lot of PDF documents that you have to go hunting for. It's workable, it certainly isn't a problem, but video walkthroughs would always be helpful. Microsoft offers that a lot for its infrastructure.

We've been using Nasuni for about six years.

Early on, there were some concerns, but over the last couple of years, the stability has been flawless.

It seems that if we were to have to scale out, it would be a very straightforward and simple process.

We have a couple of hundred technicians who connect to Nasuni, and on our engineering team there are 30 to 40 people who are retrieving and relying on the data that's coming in.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, it's taken care of by our infrastructure team that consists of three to four members of our IT team, but it does not require full-time attention. They handle administrative duties, assigning access to folders and directories. It uses Microsoft's NTFS permissioning and they add members to the group. It's not really Nasuni maintenance, it's actually the directory structure that makes up the day-to-day maintenance. There is also quarterly maintenance when we provide software and security updates, and that's a very straightforward process.

We have no plans at this time to increase our usage of Nasuni, but the potential is always there. It really has served its purpose in our particular use case scenario.

Over the later years, I would definitely give their tech support a nine or a 10 out 10, as they've been responsive. Early on, when we were implementing, it was a little bit of a challenge, but in recent years, which is what matters, they have been excellent.

We didn't use a solution before Nasuni. We just had a legacy file system, legacy Windows Servers on a standard network.

The initial setup was straightforward, but we had the assistance of a product specialist that they assigned. They held our hand through the whole implementation process. It could have been complex, but the product specialist came out and gathered our requirements and made the whole process very straightforward. They walked us through the whole implementation process, including how to set a filer up and the proper way to configure our file system for our scenario.

The configuration portion was very straightforward. After shipping out the filers to each of the locations and getting the hardware set up, the configuration process took just a few days. But the process took a bit of time because we were transferring large amounts of data from our legacy systems over to Nasuni. That wasn't really a Nasuni issue, it was a bandwidth issue with the amount of data that had to be transferred. That ended up taking closer to a month but through no fault of Nasuni.

Our implementation strategy was to move all data from the legacy system over to the Nasuni system. We then had to train all of our technicians on how to use that system. It was a straight cut-over from legacy to Nasuni.

Licensing for the data is something that is handled on a yearly basis. Pricing is calculated per the number of terabytes to be utilized with Nasuni. We're in the 60 terabyte range. We have to keep in mind our cloud storage costs. Although that's unrelated to Nasuni, Nasuni consumes cloud resources.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

The original business unit did do some investigations but I don't know which products they looked at. When Nasuni offered to do a pilot, they ran through a pilot with it. I don't think the other vendors ever got that far with us. Nasuni stood out as soon as the pilot was kicked off.

Get together with a product specialist, as we did, so they can walk you through the process based on your use case scenario. That's what they did when implementing it for us, which made it very easy. There is no way we would have been able to configure this on our own, without that support at the very beginning. It's a completely different type of technology. But they handled it and performed the knowledge transfer very well and it was easy to take over supporting it once it was working.

We haven't really had to use Nasuni's on-demand abilities. We renew our storage capacity once a year for a fixed price. We're not continuously changing that. We have to contact Nasuni and get an estimate on any price increase for additional demand.

We've been running in the same configuration the entire time, but if we had to make any changes it would be very fairly straightforward. It's all done within a central management console that communicates to all the hardware appliances and filers in the cloud.

And while Nasuni has not eliminated on-premises infrastructure for us, because we use hardware filers, it has the potential to do so. We have to have our data in the data center to create that local experience for the end-user. If we were to push those filers up into the cloud, we'd be looking at more latency, perhaps, due to network connections. We're using their hardware appliances by design, as opposed to putting them in the cloud, as we're dealing with very large files.

What I would tell a colleague at another company who has concerns about migration to the cloud and about Nasuni's performance is that Nasuni is straightforward. Once you get migrated over to Nasuni and get your data in place, it's a very easy, very secure process to maintain that data, as opposed to having to run different backup agents for particular servers. I would also say that you've got the unified file system, which allows all users at different locations to see the same data, and that is very difficult to do with a Microsoft system. And the snapshot technology is very reliable and very simple. Once it's configured, you can pretty much set it and forget it, with just some basic monitoring of it.

Overall, it has been straightforward and we're very pleased with the Nasuni system. I would definitely give it a high rating.

We use Nasuni for our production files so that they can be accessed from multiple facilities at once. 

It is deployed through VMware. 

One of my first use cases was that it removed two servers and made it a single system and improved the workflow then for that team, which spans multiple facilities.

Once you understand their architecture, it's actually very simple. It's just a very different way of thinking about things. So once you understand that, you realize how simple it is.

The ability to access anywhere, the ease of deployment, and the security are the most valuable features. Security is a big one.

It has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. This is very important to me. It reduces IT workload by having to manage fewer platforms.

It also offers us a single platform. Having a single pane to view the platform on is wonderful.

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere as needed, on-demand, and without limits. It means I don't have to constantly be upgrading a built-in solution for a fixed box.

We've used it to provide file source capacity for VDI environments. The security of it is important and the fact that it's object storage, it's immutable, and that it can't be held for ransom. It's a lot smoother than our previous processes that weren't Nasuni-based. A lot of it is done automatically just by the system being in place.

It provides continuous file versioning and helps to eliminate on-premises infrastructure, which lowered our costs. 

Nasuni helped to simplify infrastructure purchasing and support requirements. The single pane of management helps. Having one management console to do everything in, then not having to upkeep the systems in the same way as we would a normal Windows server.

Our capital costs have been reduced because we don't have to buy as much excess capacity. It has been reduced by 75%.

When it comes to business agility and cash flow compared to buying fixed assets through a hardware refresh, it has made it a lot more agile.

Some of their cross-platform features are really good, but it could always use more.

I have been using Nasuni for around seven months. 

I find Nasuni to be very stable and any issues can be quickly fixed.

One of the reasons we bought it was for its ability to scale. 

We have around 80 users at the moment that are production people, but that number is going to change if we continue to grow with it.

It requires one staff for deployment and maintenance. 

We're already using it a ton. It's improved workflows and we plan on expanding a lot more with it.

I would say that they need to make their technical support quicker. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

We used old standard box servers. 

It's very easy to reconfigure, so it makes it easy for fast deployment. This makes us more agile and quick to respond to the demands of management.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. From their side, it took a month. From our side, it took five to six months, but we had other factors that prevented us from doing it in just one month. It really could have been done in a month. It was not the fault of Nasuni.

We worked directly with Nasuni. 

I would advise having a handle on your data or how much data you plan to put into it to be within the price of affording it.

If you use cloud solutions, then there are additional charges to standard licensing. 

We look at things like Hyper-converged infrastructure. 

Given all of the features this offered and its price point, Nasuni was the best. It was far better than even far more expensive options.

End-users won't know that it has a cloud tied into it. So there's no performance hindrance with cloud integration.

The speediest way to implement it is really having your ducks in a row and know exactly what you have that you want to move and work with their team to do it.

You can really have almost everything that you need in one solution.

I would rate Nasuni a nine out of ten. I have been very happy with it. 

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.