Drastically reduces the time to detect and contain the source of ransomware.
The 44th IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Russ Kennedy, Chief Product Officer, Anne Blanchard, Senior Director of Product Marketing, and John Capello, VP of Product Strategy and Field CTO at Nasuni.
Nasuni's mission is to make file data accessible from anywhere and protect it from anything. They see file data moving to the cloud. They have seen a significant shift in 2022, versus 2021, with the majority of customers comparing Nasuni to cloud file solutions versus an on-premises solution. The public cloud providers will win a portion with their first-party offerings (Azure files and AWS FSx). NetApp will win a portion with their OEM partnerships. Nasuni aspires to be the independent solution for many “born in the cloud” benefits and multi-cloud.
Nasuni Architecture Overview
Data services are the next wave for storage infrastructure. This is being driven by massive file growth, ransomware, the need for access anywhere, and the demand for real-time analytics on large datasets.
According to Gartner analyst Julia Palmer, "Infrastructure and operations leaders must implement intelligent data services infrastructure powered by software-defined storage and hybrid cloud IT operations."
Nasuni has evolved the product and positioning evolution to address this moving from a focus on cloud file storage to file data services, networked file shares to access anywhere, single product to multi-product, and passive data protection to proactive data protection.
The Nasuni file data platform provides global file sharing, data protection, ransomware recovery, multi-site scalability, multi-cloud portability, and data intelligence. Patented technology includes a global file system, edge cache, orchestration center, and management console.
Ransomware Protection
Nasuni's ransomware protection add-on service: protects with unlimited file changes in low-cost cloud object storage; detects live attacks, alerts on suspicious file patterns, identifies the source of the threat; and, recovers millions of files in seconds with precision. This enables enterprises to spend less time investigating and to quickly regain access to files without having to pay a ransom.
Companies are able to recover smarter and faster than ever with real-time edge detection of suspicious incoming ransomware file patterns, including file extensions and ransom notes at the file source across all locations. The solution automatically maintains up-to-date intelligence on the latest emerging ransomware threats. The security team can easily identify all impacted files, culpable users, and source IP addresses via email and notifications with the flexibility to log into third-party monitoring tools.
According to Nasuni, this new service is the result of listening to customers. Leo A Daly is a 100-year-old AEC firm based in Omaha, Nebraska. Prior to having Nasuni, their team spent 12 hours assessing the damage of a ransomware attack to determine all of the files and users involved across 27 locations. Using the new ransomware detection features provided by Nasuni, their teams are now kept on high alert for malicious ransomware behavior so they can begin remediation and recovery immediately. Early detection results in faster recovery.
Nasuni received a patent for rapid ransomware recovery with files recovered in minutes with current RPOs based on frequent snapshots and precise recovery minimizes the impact on productivity.
"Once we identified which files had been hit, we were able to quickly restore. No data was lost. No ransom paid."
Market standards are moving beyond what NAS can offer. A NIST cybersecurity framework protects, detects, responds, and recovers. Unlimited file changes are protected in immutable copies in low-cost cloud object storage with continuous file versioning. Ransomware detection of the latest and emerging ransomware attacks live as they happen against enterprise files. Alert and email notifications with logging of impacted files and source users to pinpoint the culprit of the attack and restore the impacted files. Rapid ransomware recovery of millions of files in minutes to minimize downtime and avoid paying attackers.
Technical Overview
Nasuni file services platform is built for the cloud. The platform has five key components:
UniFS – proprietary file system deployed in object store consolidates files and metadata in cloud storage, creating a “gold copy.”
Virtual or physical edge appliances – local caching delivers high-performance file access without cloud latency.
Management console – a single pane of glass enables the management of appliances across all locations.
Orchestration center – infinitely scalable control plane with advanced version control and multi-region support. The cloud center is run for clients. It has an infinitely scalable control plane. Multi-site file sync keeps track of versions. Advance version control with Nasuni Global File Lock. Multi-region cloud support to ensure performance.
Analytics connector – integration capabilities to connect translated file data to any public cloud. Connects UniFS-formatted file data to any third-party cloud service.
Prior to deploying Nasuni, Western Digital engineers often had to wait 12 to 18 hours when synchronizing and sharing large design and manufacturing files. With Nasuni, these files are now transferred in five minutes.
Nasuni Labs
Launched in February, it provides access to the latest emerging innovations from Nasuni and Nasuni customers. Open source solutions developed by Nasuni and made publicly available on GitHub for customers to use and customize. It allows customers to use and integrate the Nasuni platform with third-party technologies. There is no charge to use, access, or customize the tools.
Nasuni Dashboards are available through Nasuni Labs to visualize and correlate core performance metrics for proactive monitoring, detection, and capacity planning. Users can visually pinpoint anomalies and correlate events across their infrastructure to identify and resolve problems more quickly.
Use Cases
Infrastructure moving to value-added services – The City of Denver wanted to get out of the business of managing infrastructure and facilities for data storage and focus on delivering value. They transitioned more than 500TB to Nasuni's cloud to achieve simplified management while meeting the city's requirements for storage types, resilience, and recoverability.
Massive file growth – ARA Diagnostic Imaging built a cost-effective solution with Nasuni to protect and retrieve images from 900,000 radiological exams each year. They are saving more than $1 million annually, have gained unlimited capacity, and ensure HIPAA compliance.
Accelerate file synchronization – Leo A Daly works with Nasuni to use Azure Blob Storage and caching edge appliances to ensure their architects, engineers, and designers have access to the 0.4PB of files and models they need anywhere in the world.
Modern file infrastructure – Ithaca Energy, the leading UK-based oil exploration firm needed to modernize its file infrastructure to store unlimited data and retrieve it without delay. They use Nasuni and Azure object storage for 0.3PB of data with unlimited scale that can be restored in minutes and shared quickly across new departments and acquisitions.
Search and Discovery – Perkins & Will, a leading architectural services firm with 27 offices around the world, visually tag all of the visuals the firm has created and saved so they can search their archives, more than 2PB, for presentations and pitches to show prospects examples of their work most similar to what the client is looking for.