Scalability, remote access, integrated storage, secure data, ease of use.
I had the opportunity to meet with Paul Flanagan, CEO, Andres Rodriguez, CTO, Russ Kennedy, CPO, and Dave Grant, CMO at Nasuni during the 35th IT Press Tour.
Nasuni’s mission is to redefine enterprise file storage. They’re a SaaS company selling software subscriptions as one-year contracts. The annual subscription price is based on usable capacity with price discounts for capacity bands.
They provide primary and secondary storage of unstructured data that needs high capacity. 80% of the world’s data is unstructured. Nasuni brings primary and secondary storage together with security so users don’t have to backup file servers.
Storage architectures are shifting from hardware-centric to cloud-native. Architecture is cloud-native but provides edge caching. Cloud-native is preferable because it scales, enables primary and secondary storage to be combined, provides multi-site replication and synchronization, at up to a 50% cost savings versus legacy NAS.
Cloud file services use cases include cloud-scale modernization, remote work with VDI and remote file access, ransomware protection, file backup and recovery, file collaboration, and disaster recovery. Everything is immutable and logged enabling the reversal of ransomware attacks at a file level.
File storage silos are being created which are expensive and difficult to manage across multiple locations. Today’s on-premise file infrastructure is complex with a lot of technology from a lot of different vendors. Nasuni is leveraging the power of the cloud with edge performance. The cloud is durable, scalable, and 50% less expensive than on-premises. Edge caching enables high-speed end-user file access without cloud latency.
The benefits of a built-for-the-cloud model at half the cost of a traditional NAS environment include the consolidation of NAS silos, elimination of file backups, seamless global file sharing, instant disaster recovery, avoid vendor lock-in, and, leverage cloud services.
The Future
As the presentation wrapped up, Joel Reich, former head of product and operations for NetApp shared his thoughts on the evolution of NAS. According to Joel, there are about 600,000 active NAS systems in the installed base of Dell and NetApp. Traditional NAS systems make it very challenging to provide multi-site data access, provide data protection, and integrate into hybrid cloud infrastructure. Customers will pay for operational simplicity, especially when there’s a strategic imperative to move to the cloud. Nasuni makes these challenges simple and easy. As Joel says, “it just works.”
Case Studies
Meredith Publishing wanted to modernize their data center. They’re now managing two petabytes of data for 29 offices from a single data center. They no longer need to have redundant storage maintaining and paying for twice the capacity.
Pernod Richard replaced the need for operating systems and licenses for backup while lowering infrastructure costs for 55 locations while reducing recovery times to minutes with a single cloud services platform.
TBWA, a worldwide advertising firm with many acquisitions, used the scalability of the cloud to give more than 100 offices around the world, and its employees, high-speed access to large graphics and audio files with a single cloud file services solution.
Engineering firm McKim & Creed transitioned to a remote workforce by enabling easy access to consolidated files across 22 offices via a variety of methods including directly from workstations using remote control tools and VDI.
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