What is your primary use case for Nasuni?

As a file share server and storage solution

I used Nasuni for a client in the energy sector. Their entire subsurface storage portfolio is in Microsoft Azure. They have different types of storage, like database storage, blob storage, and what we call project storage. In Azure, there's also something called AFS or Azure file storage. We use Nasuni in a couple of ways. The primary use is to act as a sort of surveillance tool for managing our storage on Microsoft Azure. Natsuni also has options for storing data. We're managing our data inside of Nasuni. We allocate specific resources and server volumes. We use Nasuni to monitor our storage space and tell us when it will run out of space. It helped us manage some analytics out of there. Every cloud provider has a cost attached to every type of storage. We can do an economic analysis on our storage between Nasuni and Microsoft Azure. We've found that Nasuni storage is cheaper on some fronts, so we use Nasuni to copy some of the data from Microsoft Azure into Nasuni Storage. If I had to summarize it, Nasuni is a storage management, control, and surveillance platform that we use. We also use it to gain some useful insights into the cost and economics of storing data in these two different environments.

Nasuni is our file system. Our employees including, engineers, designers, and accounting, store files on the system. And we have the on-prem filer, so the office folks can use File Explorer to browse the drive and retrieve or store files. Our remote users usually use VPN to access our files at our data center. At the data center we have one filer for the remote workers to access.

We are using it as a file share server. The solution is for CIFS and Windows file shares. We have boxes deployed in different environments, including on-prem and, in a few locations, it's in a virtual image. We provide support to our customers and are currently managing more than 200 devices.

Nasuni is replacing our old file-sharing system based on StorSimple, a Microsoft appliance that uses server message block technology. SMB enables you to store a range of file types. You can store Office files and various file types that require this technology. They are application-related files that interact with executables, such as INI files, library files, etc. Now, Nasuni is fulfilling StorSimple's role as the multipurpose storage solution for our application-related files. It isn't storing documents like Office 365 files, PDFs, email, VIZIO, etc. We can keep those files in SharePoint. The management console runs on a private cloud, but Nasuni hosts the file servers on an AWS public cloud. We have around 12,000 users, but the active user base is approximately 5,000. Various departments access Nasuni, including HR, finance, legal, and occasionally C-Suite executives. Our insurance and banking operations use it because they have managed and user-developed applications that use Nasuni and require SMB technology. It stores all the files apps need to run. Reports, documents, snapshots, and things like that are also stored in the same place in Nasuni. That's the appropriate use for it, but some users are misusing it. For example, some people are using unified storage instead of SharePoint.

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.

I am a Nasuni implementer, not an end user. We have deployed Nasuni at nearly 150 offices worldwide. The backend is an IBM cloud, and we use VMware ESXi on the deployment side. Due to the price of the IBM cloud, we will likely switch to Azure or AWS. From a disaster recovery perspective, we have synchronization across three locations: Houston, Atlanta, and one other. Nasuni is replicating among those. The IBM cloud is in the backend, and we deploy the Nasuni filer appliance to various locations. It transmits the cache to that particular location's bucket, which is replicated in the cloud data center, providing redundancy. We haven't enabled Nasuni's Access Anywhere feature on this project because the client doesn't want users to access storage from anywhere. Users need to connect with the network via VPN, and they access the solution from there. We have also enabled global file locking, where the data resides at other locations, but most users access it from another place.

Our use case at the moment is for our file storage for all our London offices. It's for our London editorial teams, our London business units, and also our college. We tend to keep it up to date in terms of the version. We're pretty much only a week or so behind a certain release because we know how easy the upgrade process is and we also know how successful the upgrades are. We've never had to roll back any upgrades. We've never experienced any issues with the upgrade process. So, we always keep it on its latest and greatest. We're currently only using it in our London offices. We have our backend storage, which is AWS at the moment. It's about 100 terabytes of S3 storage, and in front of the S3 storage, we have three physical filers. Two of them are in our London offices and one is in our colocation data center. We have a virtual filer as well, which is running on our Nutanix hypervisor. It's pretty much all cloud. The on-premise is pretty much just a cache. They're just filers. They're just for the speed. We're a media and publications house. So, we need our files quite close to us so that we have a cache of those files, and our editors can access those files quickly and responsively. When we purchased it years ago, we could only get it on Azure, but because we are 99% AWS, it was better that we moved over to have our costs in line with our other AWS spend.

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

We use Nasuni to provide local access to files with data stored in the cloud, so we don't have to worry about backups. It offers fast access to the data and supports multi-site configuration. Nasuni allows us to collaborate across five or six sites using the same data set. We have probably 600 filers deployed predominantly on-site, and the rest are primarily on a public cloud. However, we still have 20 filers on a private cloud. We use Nasuni on Azure and AWS, but we mostly work on AWS and have Clever Safe for our private cloud. Nasuni supports everything, including Azure, VM, GCP, and private cloud. It works on any cloud that supports S3.

We are using Nasuni for all of our storage needs. All the storage for our video surveillance and documents is on a couple of Nasuni filers. We have around 29 filers. We have 3 physical filers, and we have 26 virtual filers. In terms of the version, we upgraded Nasuni Management Console (NMC) on May 20. So, NMC is on 22.1, and the filers are also on the latest version, which is 9.7.3.

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

Unified, global file sharing while reducing costs and eliminating backups.

We use Nasuni to provide storage at various locations. It is for office-type files that they would use for day-to-day office work, such as spreadsheets. None of it is critical data. Each group at each site has its own data store. For example, HR has its own, and finance has its own. All of these different groups at different locations use this data, and they use these filers to store it. The Nasuni filers are on-site, and we have virtual edge appliances on ESX servers at about 35 sites globally. The data stored at these sites is then fed up into Azure and we have all of our data stored there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We need a traditional file server-type solution while reducing all of the complexities around the management of it.

We use Nasuni to share data between our sites. It allows us to use a single volume at different sites and different locations, which means that it is easier for us to collaborate. We used to have a small, constant amount of storage space in our server but Nasuni and cloud storage allows us to grow with no limits.

We have two offices and each one has a local appliance that we use as file servers. They both replicate to each other, and we have a third appliance in Azure for DR. If a file server goes down in one office, we can use the other one. And if both go down, we can use the one in Azure. It's a hybrid. So we have two appliances and one cloud-based appliance.

We are using it for enterprise file storage. We have its latest version, and it is a hybrid deployment. The actual storage or data resides in the Azure cloud, but you access it either through VMs or hardware that you deploy on your premises.