Nasuni Blog

Storage as a Service for Legal Businesses

Andy Jones — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0500

To: IT professionals working in the Legal Industry Does any of this remind you of your situation? You struggle to forecast data & file growth three years in the future… It’s extremely difficult to convince the partnership to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in capex for storage capacity (much of which won't be used for several years)… It’s even harder to convince people of the need to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars more in robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities… You need to share data across…

Storage as a Service, is it SaaS?

Andy Jones — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0500

I was recently reading a Blog posting titled “SaaS Makes Good Sense, Even in a Recession” by a group called Montclair Advisors. It struck me how the SaaS value propositions they had compiled could specifically all be applied to purchasing Storage as a Service, and in particular the Nasuni service. The SaaS value propositions they identified were as follows: You could try their software before you buy it Can get this software up and running quickly You only buy the functionality that you need If you don’t like…

Customer Stories: What Happens when Clouds Go out of Business?

Rob Mason — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Early last year the nascent cloud storage industry was rocked when Iron Mountain pulled out of the market. At the time there were just a few public providers and Iron Mountain was one of the early entrants and marquee names. Despite the unfortunate turn of events for Iron Mountain’s digital division (later bought by Autonomy), the team at Iron Mountain did a good job of notifying the users and partners like us of the impending shut down and worked hard to keep the system alive and functional until the announced…

Nondisruptive Cloud-to-Cloud Migration - Part 2

Rob Mason — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:00:00 -0500

In part 1 of this series I outlined the considerations and process required to perform nondisruptive upgrades and migration. In part 2 I describe our most challenging customer case study: direct cloud-to-cloud bulk migration of data between two providers and changes to the protection level of data within a provider. Both cases involved moving large volumes of data outside the customer’s infrastructure and without any disruption to the end-users. Process in action Let’s take a look at the entire process for one of…

Amazon AWS Storage Gateway

Andres Rodriguez — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:30:00 -0500

What It is and What It Isn’t Yesterday Amazon introduced the AWS Storage Gateway. This move further legitimizes the general approach to provide infrastructure as a service. Cloud storage is an essential component in providing storage services to business and we should expect that Amazon, being the 800 lbs. cloud, will try to make it as easy as possible to bring data into their cloud. In order to gauge the impact of this new offering to the emerging market of enterprise storage services, it is helpful to look at the…

Nondisruptive Cloud-to-Cloud Migration

Rob Mason — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Storage services have the potential to spare customers from the hassle and risks associated with bulk data migration. Enterprise customers demand nondisruptive upgrades to their infrastructure. Traditional storage puts the burden of migration on customers and their physical infrastructure. Storage services shift the stewardship of data to the service provider. This includes software upgrades or something as dramatic as a total replacement of the backend storage. In the first of this two-part series, I lay out…

Nasuni, Across the Globe

Louis Abate — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:28:00 -0500

We are thrilled to announce that as of January 2012, we have customers spanning 25 countries. From the United States to Australia, our customers are moving terabytes of data – securely – across all their locations. Nasuni is now being used to store, protect & share data in 25 countries! Since the addition of multi-site access, our customers have been creating global shares across their entire enterprise, without the need for DFSR, WAN optimization or VPNs. This (secure) liberation of data illustrates what is…

DR Solutions: Recovering from a True Disaster

Rob Mason — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:44:00 -0500

Early in 2011 we had our first production disaster recovery event. We had thoroughly tested the Filer’s DR capabilities countless times on our own, and George Crump of Storage Switzerland has analyzed it and reported on his experience. More importantly, many of our customers put it to the test before buying the Filer. But we never really wanted it to be used in a real-world situation. Why? Because it's there to solve the pain after a disaster. And we wouldn’t wish a disaster on any of our customers. But then it…

5 Storage Predictions for 2012

Louis Abate — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:18:00 -0500

2011 was quite a year for the storage industry. From the billion dollar acquisitions to the disruptive flooding in Thailand, it was a year to remember. As we look forward, here are 5 storage predictions for the new year. 1. Users continue to generate piles of unstructured data Back in 2009, Gartner estimated that data growth would happen at a rate of 650% over the next 5 years with 80% of this growth coming from unstructured data. We can get lost in the weeds with facts and figures but most IT managers I’ve spoken…

Goodbye, Raw Storage

Andres Rodriguez — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Storage services are putting an end to the complexity of storage pricing The storage you buy should be the storage you use. Imagine the simplicity of paying a price based not on raw storage guestimates but on the storage capacity your organization is actually using, and included in that price is everything you need to deliver and protect that storage. A single, easy-to-assess price like this is only possible when every function needed to store and protect data is delivered in a single system. Storage services do just…

Archive vs. “Archive-ish” Data

Louis Abate — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0500

Ask anyone in IT to define “archive data” and chances are it would go something like this: “Data that is no longer active, but still needs to be kept around for future reference or regulatory compliance.” You may also get an expletive or two thrown in for good measure. In many organizations, archive data is just that, inactive data – though archive data could include recently active data and data that is 5 years old. When it comes of age, this data is generally moved off to tape or to a slower, out of the network storage…

Cloud Storage as a Component in Infrastructure

Rob Mason — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:15:00 -0500

At Nasuni we treat cloud storage as a component for our enterprise storage solution rather than infrastructure. This begs the question of what makes something a component versus infrastructure. It helps to look back at infrastructure that has been around for so long, it has become almost invisible. Think of electricity. In Tom McNichol’s compelling AC/DC The Savage Tail of the First Standards War he describes the showdown between Edison and Westinghouse over the standard for power in the US. A good…

Solving Pain of Global Data Access: How Secure Multi-Site Access Works

Rob Mason — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:30:00 -0500

When Andres and I founded Nasuni we set off with a simple mission: solve a big problem for IT, completely. That was the mission. Being storage guys, we focused on the problems and pain around storage. Our past experience told us that 80% of the data was unstructured (files) and it was growing at an average of over 40% year over year. This kind of explosive growth causes problems. In our early interviews with customers -which has been further reinforced by the extensive studies we’ve done since then - we…

Server Side Encryption

Rob Mason — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Amazon recently introduced a new capability for its S3 cloud storage offering called “Amazon S3 Server Side Encryption for Data at Rest.” While this is a nice addition to S3, it is not the panacea that it may sound like. With any security solution you need to look at the threat that the solution is looking to protect against. Amazon’s encryption is automatic – just pick what objects you want encrypted and they take care of the work for you. No encryption keys, passwords, etc. are necessary. The automatic and simple…

Disasters and Drive Shortages

Rob Mason — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:00:00 -0500

The devastating flood in Thailand has caused a terrible loss of life and has severely impacted more than a third of the country. As the country struggles to deal with this terrible blow, the impact of this disaster cascades even to our storage industry. According to the watchdog group IHS iSuppli, the flooding in Thailand will result in a 28% drop in disk drive shipments this quarter, down 48 million units from a year ago. Few knew this before the disaster, but Thailand is a key contributor to some of the components…

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Providers and Scheduled Outages

Rob Mason — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:30:00 -0400

At Nasuni, we have a pretty fundamental view of infrastructure providers. While everyone understands that disasters can strike and take down pieces of the infrastructure (as occurred this week with the electric grid on a good portion of the east coast from a historic snowstorm), we don’t expect infrastructure to ever go down for a planned outage. It would be unacceptable for your Electric Company or Cable Company or other service providers to plan to disconnect your service to do regular maintenance. These…

Introducing Nasuni's Global Multi-Site Access

Andres Rodriguez — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:00:00 -0400

Multi-site access is an exciting new capability from Nasuni. Watch Nasuni CEO, Andres Rodriguez explain how multi-site access expands upon Nasuni's Data Continuity Services.

Testing the Cloud Storage Providers: Part 7 – Approval

Rob Mason — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:00:00 -0400

In Part 6 of this series we ran our formal quality assurance process against the full solution of the Nasuni Filer plus the cloud storage provider under test. Here we look at the culmination of all the testing in the approval process. Approval The successful vendors make it onto our website and are available for our customers in our next release. They are reliable, performing, stable cloud vendors that can be trusted with your data. These are the vendors that can be selected directly from the Nasuni Filer when you…

Testing the Cloud Storage Providers: Part 6 – Formal Quality Assurance Testing

Rob Mason — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:00:00 -0400

In Part 5 of this series we ran a multi-week test filling the cloud with millions of objects. Here we once again take that concept to the next level. Formal QA After a provider passes the previous tests using our python implementation of their cloud connector, we write an optimized custom connector in C (the language that our core product code is written in) that goes in the Nasuni Filer. This leverages all of the learning from earlier testing. We add a new level of performance optimizations that squeeze the last drop…

Testing the Cloud Storage Providers: Part 5 – Scalability Testing

Rob Mason — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 08:00:00 -0400

In Part 4 of this series we started the endless reliability testing run, but it’s essentially stateless. Here we take that concept to the next level. Scalability The next stage in the qualification process is scalability. As you can see by now several of these stages of testing take some time to execute. Some never end (like the one we just covered). Because of this we run many of the steps in parallel. What is the test? The purpose of this test is to get test high object counts in the cloud. Different clouds have different…