What advice do you have for others considering Nasuni?

I rate Nasuni eight out of 10. Definitely consider it. Often, the public cloud providers are not the most economical storage option, and they don't do everything. Many people think that if you take your data off of on-prem and move it to Azure or AWS, all your problems are solved. That is not true. People should look at a lot of smaller third-party solutions like Nasuni and do a proof of concept. You don't need to dive into it, but you can take specific use cases and try them out on these tools. There are so many tools out there like Nasuni, but Nasuni has experience in the energy industry and specific data types and volumes of data. I would definitely look into it. Don't rule it out. The tools are getting better. The public cloud providers are providing serverless computing and those kinds of things. Don't write Nasuni off. Keep it as an option. It is more than a surveillance tool. It's a storage option because we saved a lot of money moving data from Azure to Nasuni.

I would advise that if a company is similar in size to RRC, Nasuni is definitely worth considering. Whatever cloud solution you are heading toward, make sure it has the same type of security and backups that Nasuni provides. Anything less than that would be a step down from what we have today. I don't see a lot of economical cloud solutions out there that can rival the solid backup that Nasuni provides. By default, Nasuni stores files either on Microsoft Azure or AWS. They allowed us to choose. We chose AWS because we are more familiar with it and because our company, RRC, also has a global workforce. We put it in the cloud so that our foreign workers could access the files. We have a big workforce in Asia and South America. We went with the cloud system to ensure that the access and performance were up to standard. We cannot afford any latency when our global workforce tries to use the file system. We don't use the solution to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments. We tried VDI from different providers before, and it just did not work out. It mainly came down to two things. One was the cost per user, which was still a bit too high. At that time, it just didn't make sense for us. The second issue was that our engineers rely on AutoCAD, and when using VDI, the graphics in AutoCAD are not as smooth as when they are on a physical computer in front of them. The latency and lagging were a bit too much for our engineers. In terms of reducing on-premises infrastructure, right now our workers are requesting to work from home more, so our offices have fewer workers coming in. The trend is that fewer and fewer of our users rely on the on-prem Nasuni cache filers. When they work from home, they have to dial in to our data center via VPN. In the next 12 to 24 months we may have a new set of worker dynamics and, at that time, the on-prem filer will have to be relocated to optimize access. But it's hard to predict what our workforce distribution will look like a year or two from now.

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.

I rate Nasuni a nine out of ten. I recommend taking the training. It was excellent. The presentation was clear, and our trainer was highly professional.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The company and its technology are solid and their solution architects and support teams are EXCELLENT!! A proper directory and file structure/organization design is important to allow auto-failover access redundancy. Nasuni can explain how this can be done. If I had to rate Nasuni, I would give Nasuni 10+ out of 10. The solution has been a lifesaver.

We have a hosted data center where we don't pay for individual items, such as servers. Instead, we pay for a service. The service might include a server or storage, and Nasuni has not eliminated that because we still need our physical servers at the locations. We debated on whether or not to put the filer in Azure for each site, but we decided that it was better to have something local at this point. For our company, we were a little ahead of the curve. We didn't have internet connections directly from each site, and they all routed through a central internet connection. Because of that, it was difficult to eliminate any hardware at the site. We needed something there physically. But, having the virtual appliance for Nasuni really helps out quite a bit, because then we only have to have one piece of hardware and we can put all of the other servers that we need for infrastructure on the same ESX server. We have five or six different servers that are doing different functions that at one point, would maybe have been three or four different physical servers. Now we've reduced it to one. We use Microsoft SCOM as a monitoring tool to keep track of all of the filers and make sure that they are running. We don't use the Nasuni dashboard because we don't have to. Everything is working the way it is. We do have a management console set up and we do go into that occasionally, but it's not something that's a regular thing that our support people use. If I had a colleague at another company with concerns about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would talk about the fact that the OR capabilities are so different than anything else that I've seen. The performance has actually not been too bad. You would think that there would be an issue with the cloud stores, but we set up a local cache on each filer that allows it to store up to a terabyte or two of regularly used data. That gets probably 80% of what people use, which means that they're accessing a local copy that's synced with what's in the cloud. This means that they don't really have to go to the cloud to get a lot of it. But when they do, it's pretty quick. It may not be as fast as if it were a local copy, but it's not too bad. My advice for anybody who is considering Nasuni is that they definitely want to look at all of the options, but that Nasuni does have the best setup at this point. It offers the ability to recover things and provides data security. Especially with ransomware and all of these other new things that are causing lots of problems out there, it really helps mitigate some of that. The biggest thing that I have learned from using Nasuni is that you shouldn't be afraid of the cloud. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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 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.

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 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.

Nasuni appears to be constantly releasing new features or new functionality which, although at this point we don't use, gives us a potential in the future to expand or improve our offering to the business. If I had a colleague at another company that was concerned about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would tell them that if they're happy with the architecture, being a traditional file server type of design, then I would fully endorse Nasuni as a product. In particular, for the ease of migration and the performance thereafter. We have definitely gained insight from using Nasuni. For example, understanding how big our estate is in terms of data is something that we didn't accurately know before. We also have insights into how quickly the data we store is growing. My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Nasuni would be that if you're currently using the traditional file server architecture, then this is definitely an improvement and reduces a lot of the complexities. If you are looking for a future-proof file storage solution, then you would need to consider things around how the new cloud files are being accessed or modified. For example, SharePoint, Google Docs, and Amazon WorkDocs are examples of things that require a different architecture. Overall, our experience with Nasuni has been positive and it is difficult to say where it is that they can improve. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Based on my experience with the product, I can recommend it. If one of my friends or colleagues at another company were concerned about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would provide them benchmarks that I have that show why I am very satisfied with Nasuni overall. The biggest lesson that I have learned from working with Nasuni is that you have to work with bigger companies if you want to learn and grow your own business. For us, one of these companies is Nasuni. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

As for business agility and cash flow compared to buying fixed assets, with Nasuni we still have their appliances so every three to five years we have to do a hardware refresh. We're not 100 percent in the cloud. But it's easy. It's very easy to buy a new appliance and cut over. If a colleague at another company had concerns about migration to the cloud and about the solution's performance, I would say "Go ahead and do it. It will make your life a lot easier and the transition is not that difficult." The ease of use is pretty good. It just works well for us. I'm pretty excited about it.

I would advise others to be careful and pay attention to rightsizing the filers. They should also be aware of certain applications that have requirements that are difficult to fulfill with Nasuni. I would rate Nasuni an eight out of ten.