Nasuni Reviews

I am currently using Nasuni for seismic data. We have a huge data size, and we want to reduce costs. Nasuni acts as a caching solution, so we put some data into the cache, and the rest goes to the blob, which helps us save on costs. We use it for applications like Petrol and Tech Log, where 3D modeling is important.

The features I find most valuable in Nasuni are the unlimited snapshots, antivirus capabilities, auditing, and ransomware protection. Version control is also helpful, as we have almost all of our Nasuni deployments on a single version. Although upgrading involves some downtime, it's easy to upgrade and manage version control.

I suggest Nasuni improve their syslog forwarders to support TCP protocol, as it's more secure than UDP, which is plain text and not protected at all. Also, there should be improvements in automated load balancing since scaling requires manual load balancing.

I have been working with Nasuni for around four years.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the stability of Nasuni as nine.

I rated the scalability as seven because even though the solution can scale, load balancing must be done manually, as it's not automated.

I rarely contact tech support, as we usually rely on our technical account manager. My interactions with tech support are limited to two or three cases a year.

Positive

I have experience with NetApp and EMC Isilon. However, the solution choice depends on specific requirements. For instance, cloud support led us to choose between Nasuni and NetApp.

The initial setup of Nasuni is simple. However, setting up monitoring and alerting increases the complexity to a medium level.

We managed the setup in-house without any integrators or consultants.

I prefer solutions with lower pricing. I would rate Nasuni's pricing as eight since I consider it to be reasonably priced.

Compared to Nasuni, main competitors are NetApp and EMC Isilon.

I would recommend Nasuni to other users considering their data requirements. Overall, I would give Nasuni a rating of eight.

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.

We weren't using Nasuni when we initially moved all our data and applications from on-prem to the public cloud, but we quickly realized that it was a valuable platform for economic reasons and ease of use. A year or two after we migrated to the cloud, we brought Nasuni on board and could use it. Some other people might not have felt it was such a good tool, but our focus was always cost reduction and economical cloud computing. Nasuni played a significant role in that.

Nasuni reduced the cost on Azure because we realized that we could be more economical about our storage. Hard data is the most expensive storage option in Azure. Using Nasuni for hard data storage saved us almost half the cost. It enabled a quick reduction of monthly costs per terabyte. We realized some cost savings when we moved chunks of data over, so we decided to increase data migration from Azure to Nasuni. It was around a 40 to 45 percent reduction in cost. One year, we needed to save around $1 million dollars. Moving the data also enabled us to clean up that data much faster than we could in Azure.

The solution has helped us adapt to organizational changes. The company operates in multiple regions. Some nations have restrictions on taking the data out of the country.  Countries in the Middle East or North Africa have export restrictions. We set up a specific area and connected it to Nasuni inside that region, so we could easily configure Nasuni to help us with these export restrictions. It has a quick turnaround. If we needed to decommission volumes quickly, it was easy to copy data from one volume into another. We're using NetApp file servers, and it works really well with NetApp. I could use a tool that connects directly to Nasuni, copies data out of there or into it, and then the commission within volumes. We see the benefits almost immediately. It's highly flexible. It requires more intensive configuration on certain tools in Microsoft Azure or AWS, but Nasuni made it simple.

I was never involved in infrastructure purchasing, but Nasuni is very dynamic from my perspective. When we increased our quota or added new volumes, it was almost instantaneous. It took minimal time to spin up new storage devices or volumes. It's pretty much the same across public cloud providers or on-prem. 

Nasuni helped us break down some silos and remove some solutions we had in the past. Moving from on-prem to a public cloud does a lot to break down silos. It just helps us manage our storage better. Nasuni adds some intelligence to it. Back in the day, we had Windows file storage. 

The solution gives us a breakdown and summary of every resource and each volume within every resource. It tells us the code within a given volume, so I can go in there and look at the size of the files that are stored there. Nasuni gives me the big picture and allows me to connect things like Power BI to any endpoint. I can take that tabular information from Nasuni and look at it in a graph. 

Nasuni does have some graphic capabilities, but it allows me to connect Power BI to it and report that data to management so that we can make decisions about costs and all that from a long-term perspective. These cloud providers have tools for this. AWS has CloudWatch, and Azure has a complete billing system that lets you look at changes in storage, but it requires a lot of flipping switches in and out of different volumes. The nice thing about Nasuni is that I can see every volume on one page. 

Nasuni provides storage on demand. I can go in there to increase my quotas or set a trigger for it to increase automatically. For example, if a volume hits 95 percent capacity, I could schedule it to increase that volume by a quarter. We don't want unlimited storage because there's a cost associated with that, so we didn't want to go the route of automatically triggering it each time. We do a lot of data governance where we try to clean out these volumes as much as possible, but we have some flexibility to increase storage in a semi-automated manner as needed.

We tried Access Anywhere but didn't have a big user community using it. It was also clunky at times. We preferred to connect the visualization tools to the data and Nasuni. That was more beneficial than using Access Anywhere. However, Access Anywhere was helpful when you have limited access outside of the company network. The network infrastructure enabled us to log into the company when we worked remotely. It enabled us to meet and log straight into the console. I didn't have to use it that much, but it came in handy when needed.

Natsuni has made our lives much easier. The interface is simple. It doesn't have much drill-down capability, but it's very intuitive. It does things stepwise, from large to fine-grained, so it does a good job at that, allowing me to switch between different views quite easily. It's context-aware. I can switch to quotas and look at quotas in a specific volume. There are a lot of nice drop-down menus where I can find my specific volume. I don't think there's a large learning curve for a specific type of user. Configuring and setting it up might become a little more complicated, but we always have good support from Nasuni. They walked us through it and provided a lot of documentation.

Nasuni's continuous file versioning feature has helped us plan for disaster recovery better. We use a two-pronged approach. The public cloud providers have decent recovery offerings because they have multiple availability zones and different regions in which you can replicate your data. However, Nasuni enables us to back up our data in a much more cost-efficient and flexible manner. It's not as bureaucratic as Microsoft or AWS. It is already broken down. The disaster recovery panel is a lot simpler. We don't have to wait for weeks. Unfortunately,  disaster recovery is something you really only test when there's an actual disaster, but we've tested it in a controlled environment, and it's proven to be more economical in that sense than Azure or AWS.

We've never had much of a problem with file versioning because our other tools do a good job of how they manage the actual project data. Nasuni has specific areas of data that would be stored on-site. We had broken it down. We have another tool with multiple user folders for specific individuals. The individual is responsible for saving the latest version of the data, but it's time-stamped so the user can go back and recover all levels of the projects and data that was inside it. That approach is standalone, but we never had any problems with versioning or how we can recover files. When someone has deleted something by mistake, it was pretty easy to go into our volume and restore it from the day or week before or whatever the backup plan was.

It can provide a 360-degree view of your data, depending on how you implement it and whether you're storing your data in Nasuni. However, if you're working with multiple cloud providers, I don't think it's mature enough to provide a 360-degree view of what's in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. I think it can do it, but it's still a lot of scope and range fitting. Given that Nasuni storage is actually cheaper in some areas, it made sense for us to move a lot of our data away from Microsoft. Nasuni gave us more of a 360 view of that particular data type. 

Other data types are a little different because the company went in a direction where they wanted to store some stuff in an AWS S3 bucket rather than a file storage system. An S3 bucket has its advantages, but if you were to store more of your data in Nasuni, you would get a wider 360-degree view of it rather than on several cloud providers.

I have data in AWS, Google, and Azure, and I would like to see a wider view of all the data stored across these three top providers. Currently, I use it for AWS and Azure, but I couldn't use both of them at the same time. I think Nasuni could have better visibility across these different areas. I had to take my data out and then do some analysis to get the costs. 

It would be helpful to have more built-in analytics tools to compare the storage costs between the various cloud providers. I would also like some graphing capabilities. We had a tool called Grafana that we used for graphing. I think some more visual analytics like that would be nice.

I have used Nasuni for around 18 months.

I have contacted Nasuni support via email for specific questions. They always answered my questions quickly, and the turnaround time was less than a day. They were open to providing support and answering questions directly without extra meetings or involving a lot more people. They didn't just direct me to the manual, which many support people will do. They took the complexity out of it and assigned the correct person to the incident. 

Someone had to train me to deploy Nasuni, but it wasn't terribly complex because I have a background in Linux storage management and Windows file management. It wasn't a considerable learning curve. Obviously, I needed to get accustomed to using the interface, but everybody on my team could quickly pick it up once they had access to it and started using it. It has a high fault tolerance.  It doesn't allow you to make a significant change if you don't have the right access. You can roll back certain things if you make a mistake. It spins up pretty quickly, and you can add a lot of volumes easily. You can survey all your data efficiently, so I found it easy to use.

It took about three to six months to implement Nasuni. You have to onboard it and look at the security of bringing it inside of the VPN network. The compliance and risk management aspects took time. Our overall cloud migration experience was good. Like a lot of projects, it took longer than expected because we needed to manage a lot of risks and budget. It was a process of learning and modifying things. It didn't go according to plan but became easier as we grew into it. Our challenge has always been the volume of data. We employed a lot of tools to help us either put data in cool storage or delete it. For me, it was a great experience. Dealing with people is harder than dealing with machinery and computers.

Two or three people from Nasuni were assigned to our account. They were highly available. When I sent any emails, I got responses in under a day. There's also a hotline with 24-hour access if we need it. We can escalate something pretty quickly.

Nasuni has facilitated our cloud strategy, which aims to reduce the total cost of ownership relative to on-prem. Microsoft Azure has played a significant role in that, but there's so much data out there. In addition to transitioning from on-prem to the cloud, one of our strategies is to manage the storage levels. Nasuni helped us divide our storage into cold and hot. The data we defined as hot storage is continuously used daily for operations. Warm storage would be storage that's used around six months out of the year. Cold storage might not be used every year. That includes things like financials, events, reservoir performance, documents, and things that we only look at around once a year. 

It helped us to develop a fine-grade strategy with the cloud by giving us some storage tools and advice on how we should move storage around for cool storage to work. We also moved a bunch of applications to Azure. We have Nasuni storage, blob storage, file storage, and Azure desktop file storage. Nasuni is a good tool that I can plug into different public cloud providers. That's why it was chosen as part of the strategy. We have one picture of several different public cloud providers that are available to us.

There's a whole suite of advantages there. It reduced the cost of ownership and also automated the experience of sitting by my desk and requesting a new volume or more storage devices rather than going through our entire procurement and supply chain process. A lot of that complexity was hidden. I showed it went to someone else to approve it and go up the chain of command.

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.

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.

It replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. The main reason for purchasing Nasuni at the time was that it took out so many tiers of other technologies that we were running at the time. We had on-premise file servers. We had virtual file servers, and we had replication going from three or four different sites and that replication was going to colocations. We had tape backups. We had physical backup storage. There were multiple vendors we had to deal with. We had multiple contracts. We had outer support, hardware, and software. By bringing in Nasuni, which was pretty much full cloud-based technology, we managed to remove heaps and heaps of infrastructure, and management as well. Previously, the management was like a day job of checking backups and checking the replications running and things like that. They weren't even replicating over to the other side. Nasuni changed all of that. We were instantly making one copy straight to the Cloud, and it was available and protected. It was definitely very important for us. It was probably our biggest project at the time. It fitted perfectly into our disaster recovery process and plan. It was something simple to work with, and we didn't have to deal with those workloads. 

Some of the benefits were obviously the cost savings from not having to manage and have so much infrastructure in our colocations. Our editorial teams felt secure knowing that we had forever backups of their files. We have to have multiple copies of our publications, files, photography, and things like that, and whenever we've spoken to the departments about how secure their data is, we just tell them, "Things are never going to get lost here. We've got multiple copies. It's forever."

It offers a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. Having the dashboard or a single pane of glass means that you're not moving between different management GUIs. It's very important that everything you need to know and see is there.

It provides file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on demand, and without limits. We pay for a set amount, but there have been times when we've gone over that amount, and we've continued to work. We just spoke to our account manager and we could spin up more data. Our invoice changes because we're using up more storage, but it's there on-demand, and we use as little and as much as we like.

It's easy to configure it to support organizational changes. We have changed. Our organization has changed over time, and we've continued to make changes to the product. Although Condé Nast is a global company, we were working as 12, 13 different entities in that company. We've now merged all our offices together, which meant more people wanted access to UK data. We've now got people from the US, India, European countries, and all other areas of the globe accessing that data. It was simple to make configuration changes so that those users could access the data via their domain or via their active directories.

It does continuous file versioning for us. The files are always protected in AWS S3, and they're also protected from ransomware, which I believe Nasuni guarantees. It's not something that we configure or switch on. It's just something that's been mentioned to us by the account managers.

There is snapshot retention. There are snapshot schedules that you can set on each share or file level. You can set up whatever level you want to set for the schedules. We sometimes have our scheduling done once an hour, so we can make changes back to an hour. There are forever snapshots from day one of a file appearing.

It has increased our productivity knowing that we can restore things in an instant. We've never had any complaints from any users about bringing back the wrong type of files or not being happy with a file that we've brought back.

It has helped eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We had a number of physical file servers and physical storage and backup infrastructure, and it was also the same in our colocation where we were replicating our entire infrastructure. We managed to remove tons of on-premise hardware and virtual machines just because we could install Nasuni. In terms of the effect of this reduced infrastructure footprint on our costs, one of our higher costs would've been the rack space at our colocation. That's a massive cost reduced from our monthly outgoings.

It has simplified infrastructure purchasing and support requirements. We have a single provider for our file storage and file backups. It has simplified purchasing and management. It has enabled us to be more proactive with other projects. We don't have to manage all that old infrastructure. It has enabled us to move forward.

It's a lot simpler and more cost-effective as compared to buying fixed assets through hardware refresh.

I particularly like the restore process. Our financial teams make changes to spreadsheets and other files, and we've got teams using Photoshop files. They make mistakes and need to recover files, and we can do that instantly. We also have users who manage to delete folders, and we can bring them back instantly within a few seconds.

Knowing that it's all protected from ransomware is also a very big advantage at the moment with the number of ransomware attacks that you see out there. Nasuni is being very protective of that, which is quite good to hear. There were times when we had to replace the filers we've had issues with, and because we know all our data is protected in AWS, we could just turn them off and spin them up. As quickly as in an hour or so, we were back working with zero downtime. That area of functionality is really good.

In terms of ease of management, it's the easiest one you can use. It's very simple. It's very easy to set up, very easy to configure, and very easy to manage.

The customer portal could be improved, but it has been a while since I've used it. They might already have improved it.

We probably started using Nasuni in 2016 or 2017. That was when we first started purchasing filers and backend storage. Initially, it was with Azure Storage, and then we easily migrated over to AWS, which helped streamline our costs and things like that.

Its stability is very good. We don't have any issues, and we never had any issues.

Its scalability is very good. You can scale forever.

It is being used extensively. In terms of our plans to increase its usage, it depends on whether it's on the roadmap and it fits into our strategic vision. It was being used only in the UK, and now, we've got other products being used globally elsewhere. 

We use their technical support quite often. I would rate them a nine out of ten for their technical response.

Positive

Before Nasuni, we were using a number of products. We were using Windows File Servers. We were also using DPM for backup and replication. We were also using another tool called Double-Take for replication. We were then using tape drives. We had a lot going on. We switched because we wanted one platform.

I configured and set it up myself, and I found it very easy and simple. It took a few hours.

We set it up in-house. In terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight. We have a maintenance vendor once a month or once every other month. The upgrade process is very simple. It's very easy to follow. With one click, you can watch Nasuni do its work.

I wouldn't know, but I would guess that we have seen an ROI.

Its pricing can get a tad expensive. When we first took Nasuni out, we were just paying for the service. We got storage at a reduced rate. It has now changed, and they're now more of an all-in-one type of thing. It can be quite expensive, but it works out. Apart from that, licensing-wise, it's very simple.

We did a comparison with a few other products, but I can't remember which ones they were. 

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.

We use Nasuni for our network file servers. My company switched from Windows file servers to Nasuni, and we leveraged it to manage migrations between data centers.

The storage is fully in the cloud, and we are starting to migrate more as a company towards the cloud. I would say today, we have about a quarter of our overall workload in the cloud.  However, in the next few years, we will shift even further into the cloud.

Nasuni helps us streamline file storage and access across multiple locations. That's why we bought it. We had performance issues with a single Windows file server in one location when we had users and data centers in multiple locations. The technology enables us to make data more local to multiple different locations for users. We've been able to consolidate some of our file systems. We've combined SMB file shares and NFS into a single product.

The solution improved our organization by simplifying management and helping us to consolidate products. It makes recovery easier and ensures high resiliency. It has reduced our management overhead by about 30 percent. We used to have two different teams—managed NFS and managed SMB. We've consolidated collapsed teams, which is good from a support perspective. Also, we don't need to patch and upgrade the capabilities as much anymore.

It hasn't affected how our business operates much, but that's the great thing about it. It's a service that nobody notices, and if nobody notices, we're doing our job. It's reliable enough to where nobody's complaining about their file storage needs.

Nasuni is easy to manage and highly resilient. Resiliency is critical. We had a data center outage, but we were then able to repoint people to one of our other filers easily and keep everything available. It's an excellent hybrid cloud product. I like the unlimited snapshotting. The visibility is pretty good, but we aren't leveraging all the capabilities to give us a 360 view. The solution allows us to provide file storage on demand. That capability is essential. 

We only use Nasuni's snapshotting features. We're primarily using other third-party security products for data protection. I'd love to use Nasuni's data protection features, but our security team wants to use their own stuff. Nasuni's continuous file versioning has saved us a couple of times. It just makes recovery effortless. It's a self-service feature where users can recover their own files if necessary.

There are some issues with multiple users accessing the same file simultaneously. There would be times when the global file would lock when several people tried to access it, so that could be optimized more.

We have used Nasuni since 2018.

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10 for stability. We have had a few bugs and issues along the way, but it's been pretty good overall. I wouldn't say it's flawless. 

Nasuni is scalable. We have over 5,000 users. 

I rate Nasuni support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We previously used Windows File Servers. Nasuni costs more but we obtained some excellent features that we didn't have before. 

Setting up Nasuni is very straightforward. It's easy. It took us about four months, but we were moving a ton of data. We completed the migration in a reasonable amount of time. 

I can't quantify the ROI precisely. It isn't significant, but we've seen some benefits. 

Nasuni is cost-effective. It's a relatively affordable solution. We compared it with other products and felt like it was a good price.

We considered a few options, including Panzura, HPE, Amazon, CTERA Edge, and Cohesity.

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10. I recommend doing a POC before implementing Nasuni. Make it your primary filer tool and take time to understand your server sizing. 

We implement Nasuni for our customers. We also manage the solution and provide support. Our client is a global company that operates worldwide with a user base in the thousands. We have a 20-person team working with them. 

Nasuni has helped us to simplify infrastructure purchasing and support. The solution enabled us to replace multiple data silos and toolsets with a single file system.

I'm unsure how much money it saves, but I believe Nasuni has helped by eliminating on-site hardware. We don't need to manage the big storage devices on-site. We only need a single server that can access the cache and device from the Nasuni site.

Nasuni eliminates the need for on-prem backend storage because everything goes to the cloud. You only need to have a caching device on-site. That's the main requirement. We don't have to worry about backups or require an additional backup solution.

It provides a 360-degree view of file data, and we can provide unlimited file storage capacity on demand. Nasuni also has built-in data protection, but the client isn't using some of the features because of the performance impact. Ransomware protection is enabled because of HR-related issues.

The Access Anywhere makes it easier for administrators to manage than local on-prem storage. Nasuni is tremendously easy to manage. It eliminates many of the administrative challenges associated with physical hardware storage, and you don't need to worry about any hardware failure or products reaching the end of their lives. 

As administrators, we are used to having control equal to managing an on-prem device. In terms of log analysis and other things we want to do, Nasuni has some limitations. Nasuni could add some features to the GUI that would make administration a little easier. It's tough when I have to move from one filter to another because there is no way to search it. We have to scroll up and down to find the name of it.

There are also some performance issues. We often have users complain about the speed of accessing some files. It could be due to the different kinds of buckets they have chosen in the back end on the cloud or their network infrastructure and the kind of bandwidth they have between their office and the cloud. It may not be entirely an issue on the Nasuni end. 

We have used Nasuni for nearly three years.

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Nasuni 10 out of 10.

I rate Nasuni support nine out of 10. 

Positive

I believe the initial setup was easy. Another team handles deployment, so we're not involved. 

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10. We are very happy with this technology. Nasuni is an excellent choice if you need data storage. I'm unsure how it will work for things like VDI or a virtualized environment. I also don't know if it's a good choice for high-performance applications or databases. I haven't worked with it for those use cases, but if you want some data storage in the back end, it's a solid option.

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.

Nasuni deployment, along with its DFS capabilities, help with our SLA and RPO requirements. For example, if there is a site in Las Vegas and another site in San Francisco, and the Las Vegas site is down, then with the help of DFS, we can redirect clients to access the site from the back-end using the same path. The San Francisco site is then enabled and in an active state, but still clients will not have any issues connecting because of the Nasuni solution. So, this is an innovative solution that helps with the overall RPO requirements of our enterprise. 80% to 90% of the time, we are satisfied with its performance and with availability.

It is easy and seamless to configure Nasuni to support our organizational changes. We deployed the solution through a virtual appliance. If that particular virtual appliance is corrupted in any way, then we can deploy the OVA within no time. Within an hour, we can deploy and redirect users to the new appliance, then it can continue serving customers' requests.

There is a feature known as Global File Lock. If one of the users is accessing a file from another geographical location from where he is working, then this feature helps maintain the integrity of the file. It could be a Doc file, spreadsheet, etc.

Everything about Nasuni is easy, in terms of setup, deployment, access, and seeing the directory structure. Based on the DFS path, we are creating a directory structure, where we are pointing to multiple locations in a single directory structure. Nasuni helps with that. 

There is a minimal firewall requirement so we don't have to worry too much about the firewall.

With Nasuni Management Console (NMC), we get a single, centralized view of our entire internal structure and data center structure. This is very important because this caters to remote locations. One of the main care center teams is dependent on this solution. As it is directly connected to customers for the calls that they receive and troubleshoot, they can then help customers out in case they are not able to place an order. 

It provides file storage capacity anywhere it's needed on demand and without limits. The object storage capability helps provide storage to Nasuni.

In terms of simplicity, we have had 100% satisfaction.

The Nasuni file storage platform doesn't work well when there are a high number of small files. This is the case when a directory structure contains more than 10,000 or 20,000 small files, e.g., 5 KB, 10 KB, or 15 KB. When the user is accessing these files from another geographical location, they might face a slow response or timeouts when connecting to the shares, and then to the files. This is because the file size is small. There is a scope of improvement with this solution when it comes to accessing a large number of small files.

We have been using it for about five years.

Stability is at 80%. It is reliable. We get monthly newsletters from Nasuni regarding the state of the systems running on certain versions.

Scalability-wise, it is at 90%. We can easily scale the system.

There are close to 5,000 users across the globe who are using it for multiple purposes. Some of them are using it because they are part of the applications team. There are also some care center executives using it.

The technical support team doesn't have a lot of engineers to help customers. Thus, the response time can be a bit slower than with other vendor support. I would rate them as six out of 10.

Neutral

This was a new solution for us. We wanted to have Nasuni in place to increase our global footprint.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took 30 days to deploy to all our locations. We went with the site-by-site approach.

We worked with the Nasuni account rep team. They shared portal access to all our administrators as well as the images that we need to deploy to OVAs. Before that, we took care of the firewall network and all its prerequisites. Then, we took care of the basic finances. Once that was done and based on geographical locations, we started deploying the OVA. We shared those paths with the end users and relevant teams who could also do testing. Once they were happy, we declared that the systems were in production.

The architecture team had a meeting with Nasuni. Then, within a couple of months, we decide on the solution and design. Once they approved it, the deployment was done within no time, which simplified everything.

5 to 10 people are involved in the deployment.

We have seen 100% ROI.

For some sites, it has helped us to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. For our enterprise, there are four major data center locations. We have physical data centers, which we share and a couple that we own. This solution helped us by having us avoid investing in on-premises infrastructure-related costs, saving us about 50% of the cost by just deploying the OVA through the ESX app. Instead, we are just investing in the vCenter environment, then deploying the OVA through that.

This solution has helped minimize our administration work. Because of its simplicity, you can log into NMC and get a global footprint of which files are working and which are having some issues. So, the interface helps us take a look at our infrastructure.

Nasuni has helped decrease capital costs by 66% since we don’t need to buy as much excess capacity. 

With this solution, the license renewal is pretty swift. With the virtual appliance, you just need to take care of the OS versions and patches. In a way, we don't have to struggle much with renewals because the only thing that we need to take care of are the licenses. We renew it every three years. This aspect goes with infrastructural costs because it doesn't cost us too much to maintain the solution.

There is a cost associated with vCenter maintenance.

It is a cost-effective solution. If performance is not a priority and you want to build a cost-effective solution for the remote sites, then this is a recommended solution for you.

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.

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 provide insurance and financial services to our clients, and we rely on physical and virtual Nasuni filers to store all our data and get it replicated and backed up properly on time so that we don't lose any data. It gets cascaded to other filers as well. So, if we can't access the data from one filer, we can certainly access the same data from other filers. It provides us with flexible and efficient data storage and data replication.

It has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. We were using TSM previously. We replaced all those with Nasuni. We need these filers running, especially during the US daytime. They're, for sure, very critical. If any filer goes down during the day, we normally open a P1 ticket.

We have a lot of users who are accessing the data during business hours. So, if any filer goes down, it is a straight downtime for the users. They cannot access their documents and video surveillance. It is extremely important for sure.

It enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it is needed, on-demand, and without limits. Our license is for around 226 terabytes, and currently, we are close to 200 terabytes. It is very important for us that our data is replicated and snapshots are taken on time.

It provides simplicity of management. Our previous solution was not that efficient. It was quite complex. The upgrades were not very smooth, but the most important thing was that it was outdated. It was very old technology. After we moved to Nasuni, there are three locations where we have physical filers, and then there are 26 filers that we can access virtually. Comparing the old system with Nasuni, there are definitely a lot of advantages that we are getting from Nasuni. We are still working around certain issues with Nasuni, but the advantages still are much more than the issues that we are facing.

It provides continuous file versioning, which is very helpful. Just a month ago, an application team lost two terabytes of production data, and because of Nasuni's replication and snapshot capability, we were able to restore the complete data in about 90 minutes.

Continuous versioning helps us to maintain all the versions. When needed, it helps us go back to any version on the filer to support our IT teams and our customers.

If a user deletes a file or a file has been corrupted, we can easily go back to the previous version, and we can easily access the version without starting from scratch.

It has been helpful in eliminating on-premises infrastructure. We have only three physical servers. They are located in Bloomington, Aurora, and Chester, but we have 26 virtual servers. We are saving a lot of space by having those 26 virtual servers. It reduces our maintenance and storage costs. We have saved a lot there.

It simplifies infrastructure purchasing. For these 26 virtual servers, we don't need to have any physical servers. 

Our license is for around 226 terabytes. If we have to buy this much physical storage along with the backup and replication functionalities, the cost would be multifold, which is something we don't want to invest in right now and even in the future. We would prefer to continue with Nasuni.

Nasuni Management Console (NMC) is super valuable, and both physical and virtual filers are also valuable. 

NMC is the one-stop place for all our filers, both virtual and physical filers. They are definitely doing a great job in housing all our documents and surveillance videos. 

It comes at a reasonable price, and their support is also very proactive. Remote support assistance where we can just turn on remote support and then Nasuni's support people help us is valuable. 

There is some room for improvement when it comes to monitoring. We are not using Nasuni monitoring. We are using our own monitoring through Xenos. Nasuni can provide better monitoring capabilities for us to monitor all the filers and NMC so that we don't have to use a third-party tool.

In our company, we have been using it for many years, but I have been using it for more than a year.

It is pretty stable. Every now and then, we face some issues, but on average, it is pretty stable, and it is pretty efficient. It is the best solution which we can use. 

The upgrades are going smoothly. We get upgrades from Nasuni once or twice every quarter, and we make sure our product is up to date. We normally have one or two weeks of cooling time after we get the latest release, but we do ensure that NMC and all filers are always up to date with the latest release and security patches.

Nasuni is scalable. We just have to buy more licenses to meet our needs. Currently, our usage is at its peak. If the license is around 226 terabytes, we are already using more than 200 terabytes. We have not crossed the limit, but in the future, we probably will have to increase the licensing capacity. I don't know about our exact plans to increase its usage, but we are definitely using it super extensively.

We have more than 1,000 users from different backgrounds. Some are from the application development side, some are from the infrastructure side, and some are from the video surveillance side. The infrastructure and operation team is one of the main users of this solution, and we take care of the infrastructure and operations side, but we also have users from all other areas who use these filers to access their documents, surveillance videos, etc.

They provide great customer service and support. Their support is very proactive, and they help us with all the issues. I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I was not involved with its setup.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. We are super happy with our ROI.

Its price is fair and reasonable. I don't have anything negative about its pricing and licensing.

For us, there is also the cost of monitoring. We are monitoring through Xenos and not through Nasuni. That is another cost for us from the monitoring perspective, but as far as Nasuni goes, we don't have any other cost apart from the licensing fee.

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.

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.

Nasuni allowed us to replace a significant number of Windows File Servers with a single global system, and it gives us on-demand file storage capacity. It's essential. On a scale of one to ten, I would say it's probably a nine in terms of importance to our operations.

We can also use it with VDI environments, which is somewhat important. It creates a centralized repository every VDI workstation can access. We don't have to worry about how we present storage on each one.

it's solid and does a great job from a management perspective. However, its data propagation was pretty low when we first started using it, especially for the multi-site capabilities. For example, if site A accessed data site B, it took a while for them to get the updated version of that same data. They have vastly sped up data propagation and improved snapshot performance. 

The most valuable feature is Nasuni's multi-site capabilities. Another beautiful thing about Nasuni is centralized management. We can see all our storage and manage it from a single pane of glass. It's definitely a lot better than Windows and NetApp. We have a bunch of NAS, so you have to manage each one as a separate silo. That was much more painful.

The continuous file versioning is top of the line. We can do snapshots of up to five-minute increments. The ransomware protection is also great, and we can roll back a version from any snapshot at any point in time. It has the ability to do end-user recovery, or a user can simply contact an admin who can perform a recovery from the management console. The versioning has simplified everything. Now we don't have to worry about those components.

We've had some organizational changes that Nasuni has not been able to keep up with, mainly from a data or file system perspective. Moving a filer from one management console has been a challenge. It lacks the flexibility to move files in and out of the management console. We have six management consoles now, and we're constantly telling Nasuni, "Hey, please allow us to move a filer from management console A to B." They can't do that.

I'd like to see Nasuni add the ability to search and access your data when your users are remote from the system. 

We've had Nasuni for about eight years.

Nasuni is highly stable.

Nasuni scales to what a single piece of hardware can scale to, and it allows multi-site functionality. However, it could get a little complicated in a scenario where I have an extreme concentration of users. Everyone in our company is using it, so it's around 80,000 users in roles across the board, from finance and creative to business and IT. 

I rate Nasuni's support 10 out of 10. Their support is great. They not only help you with their solution but also often help with issues that aren't even related to them. For example, if an Active Directory server is having issues, they'll help point us to the solutions that help us from an agency perspective.

Positive

We were predominantly using Windows File Servers. We mainly switched to Nasuni to increase our company's agility by enabling cloud-based storage utilization.

It's straightforward we provisioned an S3 bucket and deploy a management console. You only need to deploy the filers after that. It took a couple of weeks to deploy and several years to finish migrating all of our data 

We did it everything in-house, and we have probably 20 people worldwide managing it, which is pretty modest compared to the solution's scale.

Nasuni reduces our expenditures and makes them much more predictable. We don't have to buy as much storage because we can scale up in the cloud if we have a spike in business. Nasuni reduced our overall storage footprint at our sites by 70 to 80 percent. The vast majority of our infrastructure isn't related to our file servers, but it has greatly reduced our need for file-server architecture.

In most cases, it enabled us to completely eliminate our backup architecture, which costs nearly as much as the primary storage. It simplifies everything because we don't have to worry about IOPs and storage. We just keep it all in the cloud. 

It also allowed collaborative features we never had before, so we didn't need to invest in a third-party solution.

Nasuni is competitive with any other solution on the market. You have to pay for object storage and the cost of the backend object storage, which is where your data will actually reside. You also have to pay for filers and the hardware to run the filers themselves. However, those costs are pretty nominal compared to what we were previously paying in total storage.

We evaluated everything, including NetApp, Panzera, etc. We looked at 20-plus solutions, and Nasuni beat them all. The advantages include flexibility and fast access to files in branch offices while retaining a single source of truth for our storage in the cloud. It allows us to scale by putting as many filers on multiple sites as needed. 

One disadvantage is the strict rules on the filers. Also, it can only be managed from one NMC, and you can't change it. The lack of search has always been a major con for our company, too.

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.

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.

The data protection from Nasuni is extremely important. Back in December 2019, our company experienced a ransomware attack and pretty much all of our data got encrypted by the ransomware. Nasuni now provides backups and an easy-to-restore process in case of this type of disaster. We rely on the backups and restores tremendously. So far, we haven't had to use that feature, but Nasuni ensures that in the case of a ransomware or cybersecurity attack, they are able to restore all the data in the shortest amount of time.

We are trying to consolidate all our data platforms and toolsets with Nasuni as a single, global file system. It's just too difficult for IT to maintain various technologies and platforms. Nasuni serves as a single technology to give us more efficient processes and workflow. It's a good way to consolidate our technology. We're not there yet, where we have a complete view of all our data, but hopefully, in the next 12 to 18 months, we can get a 360-degree view of our users and increase productivity as well.

The continuous file versioning gives us peace of mind. In IT, we can sleep better at night knowing that Nasuni has backups. I actually just looked at the configuration recently because a VP was asking if our data was being backed up and, if yes, how often. It's being backed up daily and the frequency is every 15 minutes, on average. Every 15 minutes it takes a snapshot of our data. Throughout the day, there are plenty of snapshots to restore so that does give us peace of mind.

The feature I have found to be most valuable is the revision control of the files. If somebody deletes or accidentally makes a wrong change to files, we can go back to the revision history and restore the previous versions. That is a very good feature that we rely on. A minor file recovery, when we receive a help desk ticket from an employee claiming files are either missing or corrupted, usually takes less than 10 minutes.

We're able to provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on demand, and without limits. It provides the capacity we need now.

And Nasuni has built-in antivirus and anti-malware features, which we appreciate a lot. Although we have an endpoint security antivirus solution, you cannot be too careful. Another layer of security is really appreciated. We rely on that, and Nasuni constantly sends out alerts when it detects suspicious files on the system for us to clean up. That is a very good feature.

It's also quite easy for IT to manage. It's a very feature-rich platform. However, it is not too difficult to administer compared to other platforms that we have used in the past. Even when there is a new person in IT, when we train them on how to handle Nasuni and use its features. It's not too difficult.

We explored the Access Anywhere option because we need that type of feature for our international users, but the additional costs put us off. And to my knowledge, deploying Access Anywhere is not as easy and straightforward as we would like because you still have to deploy a physical or virtual filer to each site. Either way, you still need another layer, the filer, to enable Access Anywhere.

We have multiple offices and Nasuni replicates the changes pretty fast. When users from one office save their changes, their peers in another office can see the changes within minutes. Of course, this is an area for constant improvement and we hope that they can still reduce the amount of time it takes to replicate changes. The minimal wait time used to be much longer but they have improved it. They implemented something called Global File Acceleration that accelerated the replication and we appreciate that a lot.

Replication depends on a lot of factors, such as a site's internet speed, bandwidth, and congestion on the network. However, we hope the Nasuni team continues to strive for faster replication and makes it more efficient.

Another issue is that you can configure each filer to have web access. This is different from the Access Anywhere feature. You can create a web portal for a filer where a user can log in using their Active Directory credentials. We would like to enable multi-factor authentication for this type of web access to the filer. Relying only on Active Directory credentials is still not safe enough. We are using Duo multi-factor authentication and we would like to see Nasuni integrate with Duo so that we can further secure the access. To my knowledge, although I could be wrong, they don't have that yet.

In addition, Nasuni relies on a reseller, a middle-man. Our reseller is a company called SHI, and I am not happy with SHI's performance. I expressed this to our Nasuni account manager. I told him that every time we want to order a Nasuni filer, we have to go through SHI, but the performance has just not been competent and our point of contact has not been knowledgeable. Often, things have not been handled properly. SHI, on a scale of one to 10, with one being the lowest, would be about a 2 or 2.5. It fails miserably. The purchasing process, the shipping of new equipment, has actually wasted a lot of time and the inefficiency and delays all cost money. Nothing is wrong on the Nasuni side, rather it's all because of the reseller.

I have been using Nasuni for almost four years.

The reliability, compared to the past three platforms we have used, is very good.  It is the most robust solution we have used, by far. It is very stable and definitely an enterprise-level solution.

We have about 450 users of Nasuni and our company is growing. If we open new office space, we will definitely consider adding an on-premises Nasuni filer, depending on how big the office is.

Nasuni's support is excellent and our account manager is great. If any ticket sits there for too long or I do not get the answer I am looking for, all I need to do is talk to our account manager. He will help escalate the ticket or he will locate an engineer to speak with me or our IT staff directly to get a clear answer. I would give their support team a very high score.

Positive

All our data on Nasuni is in the cloud, on AWS, but we do have an on-prem cache called filer.

Setting it up is not too difficult. It did not take that long. From zero to go-live with the Nasuni file system took around 60 days. 

In terms of our cloud migration process, back in 2019, right after the ransomware attack, we salvaged as much good data as possible and put it on Nasuni. The cloud migration took a good five business days to fully migrate any good data that wasn't encrypted to the Nasuni AWS cloud.

We don't have a big IT team but maintaining Nasuni does not take a whole lot of resources.

It was just our It team working with the Nasuni engineers. And fast forward to now, every time we want to add an additional Nasuni cache filer, it's done in-house, and it takes between four and eight hours of work.

We definitely have a very good ROI.

The pricing is fair. It's an enterprise-level solution so it's not inexpensive. But when we grew to a certain level, we could no longer rely on what we call "mom and pop solutions", like Synology. For a small business that is just getting started and needs a file system, Synology is great. It's very affordable. But when you grow to a certain size, it can no longer handle the demand. Nasuni is one level up from that.

It also simplifies things, in terms of cash flow, if we want to expand our Nasuni solution. Nasuni does include fixed assets in the form of the on-prem cache filers. They are basically Dell servers. But the solution is straightforward for our budget and cash flow.

The cost is pretty stable year over year. We allocated part of our annual budget to make sure we cover our Nasuni overhead costs. It's easy to forecast what it's going to be. 

Before we went with Nasuni, we tried three different products for file system replication: Synology, Global File System, and PeerGFS. They were not enterprise-level and did not work out. They each have their own problems that are too significant and led to a lot of business impact.

We have recently been exploring using SharePoint as our collaboration platform so that certain files would be stored on SharePoint. But I can still see Nasuni serving as our primary file system. While you can collaborate on the cloud, when a project is done you have to move the files to Nasuni for the security of the backups.

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.

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. 

We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files. Nasuni has reduced the friction and noise associated with file management because the devices are more reliable. 

When we were using StorSimple, we had at least two priority-one incidents in which business-critical applications were affected. Those were serious problems, and we were required to notify the regulator. We haven't had any critical failures since we started using Nasuni. 

Our previous solution was noisy and awful. Now, it's quiet and smooth. We don't hear anything. I don't have precise figures, but the percentage reduction in issues must be huge. Storage was a problem for everyone, from the CIO to the engineers. We don't hear the same complaints. When we get tickets, they're not related to reliability. Our tickets mainly relate to access issues where the end-user doesn't fully understand the self-service or automated components.

StorSimple was complex and out of control. Nasuni is relatively simple, so even I can understand it. It's easy to manage, and we're happy with it operationally. 

Nasuni is adaptable to organizational changes. For example, if we did a merger or acquisition, we could easily add another volume or file-sharing instance. Nasuni could accommodate a rapid expansion or merging of data. I don't think Nasuni would make removing file shares any harder or easier. That comes down to how well the shares are named and whether we can identify who owns them. There's not enough metadata about the organizational unit on the shares to help us, so it would still be a bit of a manual process.

We couldn't just say that we're selling off this business unit that owns these, so we need to ready them for migration out of Nasuni to the host of the next organization that's taking over. There's not enough metadata on the shares to tell us. However, we could identify those using a different tool. We could analyze the data and identify the owners. That's no problem. And if we could link those to business units being sold, isolating or tagging those for migration wouldn't be that hard.

The continuous file versioning is excellent. We have a refresh cycle of around five minutes. If there were a ransomware attack, we could roll it back to as recent as five minutes ago. We typically wouldn't discover ransomware attacks too quickly, but we have that enabled, and it's handy. 

Users can also roll back files to a previous version if they know how. Otherwise, they will need to raise a ticket to notify us when a file has been corrupted, or there was an unauthorized change. Nasuni creates lots of versions and works pretty efficiently. It snapshots only the differences, so the storage doesn't get out of control. 

With continuous file versioning, we don't need to worry about timely backups and restorations. We trust Nasuni to do their full backups in an environment we can control. It's a contracted service-level agreement, so we don't need to test it, and we have no desire to. We have tested the disaster recovery process in a training scenario and will do it in production eventually. That's scheduled for later this year. It will probably be in Q4. I believe the tests we've done in training fairly represent what should happen in production if we need to restore. 

It has replaced some on-prem infrastructure when discussing hybrid situations involving a private cloud. In this case, we use a private cloud for the management console, and the file storage volumes themselves are sitting on the cloud. Most of the data is not on-prem, but we still have some on-prem infrastructure. It's on-prem because we configure and manage it and control the VM for the management console. 

I think Nasuni is cheaper to operate than our previous solution. We removed some data and plan to eliminate more, so our overall storage footprint will decrease, but it hasn't yet. We're still working on that. That will reduce costs. We had one person managing StorSimple nearly full-time, and two or three people had to frequently stick their noses in it because of the problems. It only takes half a person to manage Nasuni daily. 

We spend a little more because we're cleaning up the ownership and improving our technical state compliance monitoring. We're working with Splunk and are getting the Syslog server configured and reporting correctly, so we need a full-time person.  

Nasuni simplifies infrastructure purchasing and management because we're only responsible for our management console and the Syslog server. We provide that as VMs in our private cloud. The file storage is Nasuni's responsibility, and we pay a subscription fee per terabyte. If we want more terabytes, we ask them. They do the provisioning and expansion and seamlessly match up the volumes. 

Nasuni's security is excellent. The data is chopped up and encrypted. Even if someone manages to intercept the encrypted data, they can't make sense of it because of the way it's chopped up. 

Another thing I like about Nasuni is the way it handles private keys. It's like an escrow service, which I find trustworthy. They allow us to manage the private keys. I would think twice if Nasuni had a service where only they could control the private keys. If they had no escrow service, that would also not be ideal. The sole responsibility for the keys would rest with the customer, who may not always know how to manage those keys. If you lost the key, then too bad. All your data is gone and can't be retrieved. I think they've struck a nice balance by allowing the customer to make that choice. 

Nasuni provides enough reporting to see what's happening. You can see the number of shares, total volume, issues, conflicts, etc., but it doesn't provide much visibility from a content perspective. For example, it doesn't tell you the data age. When you're trying to sort and filter information, the data creation date is a critical factor. Nasuni doesn't give you that. You can't get a count of all the file types, like the number of PDFs, Word docs, and PPT files.

It lacks some content reporting. Then again, it's doing what it is designed to do. Nasuni provides a management console that lets you do specific functions, and it does those well. However, they haven't tried to include functionality that would be useful to people who want to manage the information at a global level. We have to use another tool for that, but it isn't expensive. 

We run scripts that take a month or more to complete because we have a lot of data. It's taking us a long time to get more detailed information on what is in there. It would be handy if Nasuni offered built-in features for reporting on data ages and file types.

Nasuni went into production in the fall of 2022. I became the product owner this month, but I have been training on it since February. 

I rate Nasuni's support a nine out of ten. I don't have regular contact with support. My engineers deal with them. I haven't heard any complaints, which is a good thing. If they were getting anything other than prompt, accurate answers, I would hear about it. 

The lady who provided the training was excellent. She used to provide advanced tech support but has since shifted to a customer success and training role. She's completely reliable. We know her and like her.

Positive

I wasn't involved in the deployment, but I believe Nasuni was relatively straightforward to deploy. At the same time, there is a lot to learn, and you need to do a lot of configuration. Based on my experience in training, I know there are probably a hundred configuration decisions to make because you have various options. I don't think it was complicated or too difficult to understand.

The deployment required four employees who were involved for several months. You need an architect and some integration people who know how it works with the licensing, provisioning, and automation of the design. After deployment, you only need one full-time person to maintain and administer the platform. 

There are cheaper forms of storage, but Nasuni is fairly priced for the functionality it offers. I can get basic file shares provisioned in Azure and pay for the storage and the CPU. The overall cost would be much less than Nasuni, but I would need to build the management console and encryption process, so it would cost a lot to develop that kind of functionality. 

Nasuni offers considerable value with its scale and attention to this particular type of storage problem. You pay a subscription per terabyte that is much more expensive than the cost of basic storage. But you need to consider the costs of the entire ecosystem and all the other things like security, encryption, reporting, and scaling. Nasuni provides a complete solution, and they've already worked out all the problems we would encounter if we tried to do it ourselves.

You sign a contract for a specified number of terabytes. If you want to increase that, you have to make a formal purchase for an agreed period. For example, we're at 200 terabytes. Once we approach full capacity, we need to make a purchase order for more terabytes and contract to pay for that for at least two years. It's a formal block approach rather than an elastic on-demand method.

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.