Nasuni Reviews

We use the Nasuni Filers and Nasuni Management Console (NMC) to manage those Filers.

We have four offices in Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. In each office, we have a Nasuni Cloud Storage Gateway that allows end users in each office to access their data in the cloud. However, that data is cached locally.

It is an excellent solution for collaboration. We are an architecture firm. For example, we may be working on a set of architectural drawings files here in Los Angeles. We save those drawings at 17:00, then those drawings will sync to other offices. When other offices, e.g., China and Shanghai, come online, the data is there and on the network drive. They can continue working on those drawings or meet with clients. They can also access them on an iPad if they are at a job site. So, it is very useful for collaboration on a global scale.

The product integrates with industry standard platforms, like Active Directory. So, it is very straightforward to apply changes to the organization.

If we were hit with ransomware, we would have to know the time of the ransomware, then we can easily recover files using Nasuni Management Console.

It is much simpler to upgrade a solution because the data is in the cloud. You are just upgrading your gateway and pointing it to the cloud. So, it is much simpler to upgrade.

The bread and butter of what it does is the ability to sync data. Because in architecture, we are using unstructured data with a lot of big files and large file structures going from one place to another. Nasuni does that very quickly.

I can see who is logging in on files from all over the globe. For example, if a file is locked, maybe a user in Shanghai has locked files or something, I can see that from the Management Console, then unlock the file. I would rate the importance of this feature as nine out of 10.

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it is needed and on-demand. I would rate this feature as nine out of 10 because of the nature of our business. We can look at identical data for all our locations at the same time, which is very useful.

The tools are very good, and I learned them. They are relatively straightforward.

The end user has the ability (on his own computer) to recover a file.

I would like to see them improve their tools in regards to accessing data using smartphones, tablets, and iPads. I think the Nasuni app could be improved to make access to the data cleaner and more efficient.

I have been using Nasuni for four and a half years.

It is a stable product. I wouldn't be using it if it wasn't stable.

Its strength is that it is extremely scalable. It is very quick to spin up a new Filer. We have opened and closed offices in the last four-and-a-half years. So, I have had to spin up a gateway, then I have to shut it down and move it. In that sense, because the data is in the cloud, that has been a huge strength of the product.

We are limited by the subscription that we have. We have incrementally increased our data. We have increased our data by probably five percent a year. So, I suspect we will continue to add about five percent per year to our subscription.

Everybody uses it, which is about 110 employees and consultants.

I would rate the technical support as seven out of 10. 

Before Nasuni, I would use more conventional storage arrays from larger vendors, like Dell EMC and HPE. We switched because Dell EMC didn't offer a cloud option or the ability to quickly sync data to our other offices.

Nasuni has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. We still have separate storage in our offices. However, that storage is really for less critical data, libraries, etc., where the most critical data is on the Nasuni platform.

Replacing multiple data silos has been extremely important for us. The alternative is the way that we did business in the old days. Previously, we worked on a storage array here in Los Angeles, then we would have to transfer the files in some way (from one place to another) to a separate storage array. With the amount of collaboration that we do globally, that is very difficult.

In the old days, we would have an architect fly to China and meet with a client about a drawing or design, maybe at a job site. We are not able to do that anymore due to COVID-19. Instead, we now can have our staff in China pull up the same drawing on an iPad and mark up the drawing using a web conference. This solution provides us reach to our clients, which is very important.

The initial setup was not simple, but not complex.

Our deployment took 30 days.

I worked with Nasuni Professional Services. Over one weekend, we migrated the data.

We also worked with Consiliant Technologies for the deployment. Our experience with them was excellent.

I do the maintenance and upgrades of the product. This takes one person (me).

I see ROI qualitatively from people in our global offices. After I made the change, their workflow definitely improved.

Continuous File Versioning definitely saves me money on purchasing expensive backup solutions.

We still use on-premise infrastructure, but it does eliminate part of our infrastructure. It is about a 20% savings versus conventional storage arrays and backup solutions.

Because you are paying for a subscription, there is less of a CapEx cost. It has reduced our capital cost by about 40%, but we are paying for a subscription as well.

It has a license fee as well as hardware costs, which we would incur if we want to use Nasuni Cloud Storage Gateway for upgrades.

We pay for a subscription.

We looked at keeping our Dell EMC storage arrays. I also looked at Panzura and Nasuni. Both Panzura and Nasuni fulfilled our requirement of syncing the data. However, I preferred Nasuni's architecture and the way that they did it.

Nasuni is the preferred solution of our CFO because the business agility and cash flow are more predictable.

Investigate the cloud provider that you want to use, whether it is Microsoft Azure, AWS, or whatever Nasuni supports. Do that research first, then investigate with Nasuni regarding pricing.

You need to determine what data you are willing to put up in the cloud, then what data you deem critical to be cached locally in your location. For example, if you have 20 terabytes in the cloud, how much of that do you really need cached in each location? Is it five terabytes? Is it seven terabytes? This information will help with the migration.

If you have a requirement where you have multiple locations that need to look at identical data because of collaboration, that is Nasuni's strength. If that is not a big requirement, then you would probably look elsewhere.

A big advantage is having the data exist in the cloud. This has certainly relieved a lot of pressure from our IT department in regards to having a backup as well as preventing some ransomware in all of our offices. That has definitely been a big plus.

I would rate it as nine out of 10.

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. 

It's mostly for internal users. We use it for internal file sharing. We have moved our various departments, such as marketing, finance, and HR, to Nasuni. We started using it because of the StorSimple devices coming to an end of life. Microsoft announced that, so we considered Nasuni as the first option for internal file sharing of users.

It's on the cloud, but we started on-prem. We borrowed the filer from Nasuni themselves and completed the migration just to speed up the process, and then we sent the filer back. We are now completely on the cloud backed up by AWS.

We are using its latest version. We did the update two weeks ago to the latest version that we received from them.

Snapshot backup has been a lifesaver. It sometimes used to take us close to five hours to back up one spreadsheet for users because we were using physical file servers. We have not received any complaints from users regarding the performance or a connection or network not being available. It has been good so far.

Nasuni has also helped with data consolidation. It has improved our compliance and risk management with data consolidation. We have all our data in one place.

Nasuni has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. We are only using a single, global file system instead of the five physical servers that we had previously. It's really good. We started with this project because we wanted to do data migration because of the StorSimple issue, but then we found out that we could do data consolidation at the same time because it did support multi-site access. We now have all our data centralized in one place, which is very helpful and useful. At the time of considering and doing data redundancy, we will only have to do it on one site instead of multiple sites.

Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We were using five physical servers before. Instead of them advising us to buy a physical server to do the migration, they lent us one for free. We did our migration, and we sent it back to them, so that was a great call from them. We didn't even know that option was available. It was their sales team that suggested this. Otherwise, we would have ended up with one file server that we would not have been using. It would have been just on commission if we had to buy it ourselves.

Nasuni offers a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. We call it Nasuni Management Console. They do provide their own console for us to manage our data, which is a shift from the old way of managing our data. We used to have to physically log into the server and manage our data, but now, we manage it all in one place. It's quite an easy and straightforward process.

Nasuni doesn't provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. You would have to sign up with them, but you can always request or demand a capacity increase. You have to go through a process with them, but the customer support is quite fast, so you can request it and then get it applied within the same day. I'm not sure about unlimited, but I know that we're using 20 terabytes, and we're able to expand it if we want to. It's $850 per terabyte. We do need this capability to be able to expand because it's an internal file system. At some point, our security team might decide to do a backup of the data, and that will just double the size. We need to have on-demand storage capacity support because the company data is growing day by day, so we would always need it. We would need to request more storage from Nasuni in the next couple of months.

With the support that was provided for us, it was easy to configure the solution to support organizational changes. It wasn't very easy, but it was easy. They were with us every step of the way. With their support, it got quite easy for us. We expected it to be way more complicated than this. It did not affect our business in a bad way. There was hardly any downtime. We completed the data migration, and then we did the switch within five minutes to Nasuni filer. It affected our business in a good way that the users did not even feel the change. A lot of users did not even notice the changes until we told them. We had to tell them to change the path they were accessing or the directories they were accessing. That was the only way it affected users, but that's not just with Nasuni. It would have been with any other vendor.

Nasuni has also simplified infrastructure purchasing and support requirements. We no longer have to worry about buying physical equipment. In terms of its effect on the time and effort spent on infrastructure support, we will be able to measure that only after a year. Next year, we don't have to worry about backup. We don't have to worry about maintaining the devices or upgrading them to the physical ones or buying or renewing a license. Overall, it has helped a lot. It would be a great shift next year once we do the infrastructure budget again.

Snapshot backup is most valuable. It's quick and easy to use. It's controlled only by an administrator, which is very good. It takes 10 seconds to back up a spreadsheet of three or four megabytes.

It can be improved in terms of retention policy or data retention for the volumes. We found this quite frustrating because different departments in our organization require different retention policies. For instance, the finance team wants their data to be kept for seven years. It's a legal requirement, whereas the HR team needs it to be kept for 10 years. The marketing team only wants it for the next two years. Nasuni does not support different retention policies within the same volume, so you have to keep creating volumes for retention policies. When you create a new volume, it means you're starting from zero all over again. You can't move data between two volumes. You have to move them from your physical device to Nasuni or your cloud device to Nasuni. That has added a lot of time for us because we were not aware of that feature, but when we shared this with Nasuni, they said it's something they'll be working on in the next quarter.

We started with it in November. We have been actively using it since November, but we started the process of migration in late August. It has been less than a year. 

So far, we haven't had any issues with them. It has been good so far. The stability has been good and on point.

Currently, we have around 400 internal users.

Their support is very good. I'd rate them a nine out of ten. When we send an email, we get a response from them within the next three hours. 

Positive

We had StorSimple from Microsoft. We switched to Nasuni because StorSimple devices were coming to an end of life.

It was straightforward because we got support from Nasuni every step of the way. There were two people involved in its deployment: myself and someone else.

It took us about two weeks between meetings and having an initial deployment. It would have taken one week if we were properly organized from our end as well because a lot of the staff were not available.

It has been a pleasure working with them. They have been one of the best vendors so far. They are quite good, and I just hope we can continue this with them.

It's too soon for that. In one year's time, we will be able to give a full financial overview of how much is saved in terms of costs.

When it comes to business agility and cash flow compared to buying fixed assets through a hardware refresh, with Nasuni, it's the way forward. It's not just Nasuni, it's with everything. It's the way forward for the infrastructure of any IT department to buy everything on the cloud.

We are trying to move everything to the cloud. It has saved us about five grand in the total overall project cost. In the long run, it's going to reduce the carbon footprint as well. At this time, it's hard to say whether it has decreased capital costs. This kind of feedback would be possible in about a year's time because we've paid for the initial project. We paid for the S3 bucket on AWS, so our cost is quite high, but we will be able to evaluate the cost next year. We had to pay for everything at once, and we have been using it for less than a year. Next year, the cost will be very, very low because we don't have to renew the S3 bucket anymore. We've already bought a few years of reservation with them.

We did evaluate Azure Files and AWS as well, but the costs were quite high for both of them. They did not meet the security requirements, whereas Nasuni met the security requirements we had.

Do a cleanup before you get the initial cost. Do the data cleanup. Because we didn't clean our data properly, it came out to be 20 terabytes. We ended up using about 12 terabytes, but we had already signed the contract with Nasuni. This is no fault from Nasuni's end; it's from our end. So, organize your data, clean it up, and then request the quotation from Nasuni.

Any infrastructure team that wants to move to this solution should clean their data and consider retention policies. These are the two lessons we've learned from using this solution. Check with different departments because apparently, every department has its own retention policy. We found this the hard way.

To someone who has concerns about migration to the cloud and about the solution’s performance, I would say that we had the same concern, but four months in with Nasuni, we did not receive a single complaint from the users, whereas with our previous solution, we had filers at the same physical location where the users were based, but we used to get a lot of complaints about the performance and stability. I would recommend testing it out and reading the reviews about it.

In terms of our cloud strategy, we only have snapshots and backups. We have an active backup, which was advised by Nasuni anyway, and we applied a few retention policies as well on some of the files. This is the strategy we currently have. We will be considering redundancy, but because of the cost, we will just put that on hold until next year.

We have not used Nasuni for data protection. It was just a budget issue from our security team. They already had data protection with other vendors, and they will wait for that contract to finish.

We have not used the Access Anywhere feature, but we are considering it. We had a meeting with them last week regarding Access Anywhere. We haven't yet had an in-depth conversation with them. We have also not used the Continuous File Versioning feature or add-on services.

Overall, I'd rate Nasuni an eight out of ten.

I am a Nasuni implementer, not an end user. We have deployed Nasuni at nearly 150 offices worldwide. The backend is an IBM cloud, and we use VMware ESXi on the deployment side. Due to the price of the IBM cloud, we will likely switch to Azure or AWS. 

From a disaster recovery perspective, we have synchronization across three locations: Houston, Atlanta, and one other. Nasuni is replicating among those. The IBM cloud is in the backend, and we deploy the Nasuni filer appliance to various locations. It transmits the cache to that particular location's bucket, which is replicated in the cloud data center, providing redundancy.

We haven't enabled Nasuni's Access Anywhere feature on this project because the client doesn't want users to access storage from anywhere. Users need to connect with the network via VPN, and they access the solution from there. We have also enabled global file locking, where the data resides at other locations, but most users access it from another place. 

In organizations where we had implemented Nasuni, we performed migrations and a few other tasks, like consolidating the data and legacy domains. We migrated the existing data onto Nasuni, simplifying the environment by consolidating multiple file servers at the exact location. We eliminated the numerous storage devices from Windows, NetApp, or other vendors.

By switching our clients to Nasuni, we decreased our clients' on-prem footprint and significantly reduced costs. For example, let's say a client has ten NetApp file servers in one location, we can replace all of those with a single Nasuni appliance. A mid-sized appliance can replace five or six file servers, and a small one can replace one or two. 

When existing file servers reach the end of their lifecycles, we must replace them with new hardware. We recommended that the client adopt Nasuni, so the client saved capital costs by reducing the hardware space and hosting charges. At the end of the day, it definitely reduces capital and operational costs. I can't say how much because I'm unaware of the license costs. 

My clients are happy with Nasuni because the transmission is seamless, and it consolidates all the existing file servers into one location. Also, Nasuni has no boundaries. It's infinitely expandable. They don't have to rely on the service provider for backup and restoration. It's self-serve. 

Nasuni has an excellent management console that gives us visibility into all locations worldwide. Everything is visible from a single dashboard. We can see the amount of data stored and the number of servers or users connected. It also has metrics on the utilization of bandwidth and other resources. Nasuni provides a single portal from which we can control and monitor data. 

It offers clients unlimited file-storage expansion with an IBM cloud on the backend. We buy petabyte licenses for our clients and add licenses if we exceed the limit.

Data protection is another crucial feature. Nasuni creates snapshots of the data in my environment with versioning. Users can revert to the previous versions on their own. We have a strong contingency plan if a client is attacked. They can restore the data from the portal. 

We forecasted that the data at my client's organization would grow by about ten percent annually, but we are migrating more data because we are bringing in some servers that had not previously been within the scope of our license. We expected it would take us two years to reach a specific amount of data, but we hit that mark in one year. The licensing cost skyrocketed, so we need to renegotiate. It puts us in a bind because we are reliant on Nasuni for our service strategy. We can't deny our customers, but we also struggle to pay for that. 

I have used Nasuni for two and a half years. Once we finish migrating this organization to Nasuni in July, I will move on to another project. 

We haven't experienced any downtime in the last two-and-a-half years during our global deployment. So we haven't got any downtime because everything is hosted in our organization. We can't say that it's hosted somewhere else. If it is going to be down, that means our infrastructure is going down first.

I rate Nasuni support a ten out of ten. They provide instant support when we have an outage that affects 20 or so users. Nasuni sends a senior engineer. Other vendors like Microsoft don't escalate that quickly. 

Positive

My clients used on-prem Windows file servers in each office, but Nasuni is a cloud-based solution, so it's more reliable. Nasuni has advantages over competing solutions like Windows File Server, NetApp, StorSimple, etc. Nasuni provides a single portal we can use to manage and monitor data. 

It also allows unlimited expansion of storage, which is unavailable on a traditional Windows File Server. You aren't limited by dependence on a storage site or the EMC backup. Nasuni's console backs up automatically without any interventions, and you can restore from there. Nasuni has many features that Windows Files Server or NetApp devices can't provide.

I can only speak for my client's use case, but deploying Nansuni was complex because we migrated data from existing Windows file servers or traditional storage solutions to Nasuni. It was a complex lift-and-shift operation because we needed to consolidate the domains and data. However, it should be straightforward if you are migrating some existing data to Nasuni. 

We did the POC in 2018 but didn't deploy Nasuni until 2020. We were doing POCs for multiple solutions before we finalized our decision. The implementation started in 2020, and we still aren't finished with the project, but we finished deploying most of the locations. The total deployment time depends on the organization's size, the number of servers and locations, and the amount of data you are migrating.  

Our client determined the deployment strategy. After the POC, the client was more confident in the solution, and a strategy started taking shape, but new challenges emerged. We had to consult with the IT teams at each location, who were worried about where the data would reside and complications due to GDPR or other national regulations that require data to stay within the country. The strategy was not a straight line and depended on various agreements everyone had to reach. 

The size of the team needed also depends on your organization and the number of filers deployed across the organization. I can't give a simple answer that you need X number of people. In our case, it involved VM, storage, cloud, and network teams. 

After deployment, we have to do periodic upgrades. Nasuni's management console displays the version of each filer. We need to upgrade, but it requires downtime. Each week, we have a region-specific patching window. The management is easy and practical. 

We are the implementer, but we open a ticket with Nasuni support when we face an issue that we can't fix. We provide them remote access, so they take over the console and fix the issue. 

Azure has a similar solution in its early stages called StorSimple, but it isn't as reliable yet. You can control and integrate multiple clouds in the backend seamlessly and control storage globally from a single console.

I rate Nasuni a nine out of ten. I'm satisfied.

If you plan to implement Nasuni, I recommend reading the company's white paper with all the details and technical specifications during the POC. Nasuni allocated a dedicated resource to help us through the POC process. Contact Nasuni and see what resources are available to help you implement it. 

We use the solution for file sharing, redundancy, and restore features. 

Regarding cloud strategy, we use a bucket in the cloud, but it's all private, so nothing public hits it. We have elements including the bucket, a filer, and an MC component; it's all there but only accessible from within. Part of our strategy when deploying filers and locations is to ensure firewalls are set so that traffic never exits; it's technically the internet, but we use a private IP, so no data travels over.  

Nasuni hasn't replaced any other solutions; we use it side-by-side and implement it at new sites. We're an extensive organization, so we can't just replace tools; it would take a very long time, and the initiative would have to be of great importance. Much money and work would go into replacing products, including storage requirements, buying a filer and spooling it up, and all the associated activity across multiple sites.

It's relatively straightforward to configure the solution to support organizational changes; Nasuni provides the required TCP and UDP ports. The product has its requirements, but they're easy to meet. When we harden the tool, this gets harder, but the actual Nasuni conditions are manageable.  

The product has a lot of zero-touch operation, which is good; we don't have to intervene too much except for updates, which is somewhat annoying. 

One of Nasuni's best characteristics is its fully redundant system; we don't have to shift tapes or use other backup solutions. It's a good, full-featured product.

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits, which is essential for a global file storage solution. 

The solution provides Continuous File Versioning, positively affecting our ability to recover from ransomware or a disaster. We can roll back using protected snapshots, and we may lose some data, but how much depends on when the snapshot was taken and what's affected by the event.  

Continuous File Versioning also positively impacts a user if they delete a file or a file becomes corrupted. We can resurrect the file any time after its creation, based on our policies. For example, every volume can have a different retention policy, with backup increments every ten minutes.  

Sometimes, there are too many updates; recently, Nasuni flagged a virus incorrectly, and there was an update to fix that. This is not good in a production environment, so the solution isn't as mature or stable as needed.

The privilege settings need to be more granular, and alerts are an excellent example. If a user doesn't have access to them, they can't see them and access information such as what they may have done wrong, what's there, and when the last sync happened. However, the ability to view alerts also comes with permission to delete them, which is not good, so we need more customization options here.  

There are a few little functions that Nasuni can do for us, but we can't do for ourselves, and it shouldn't be that way. We should be free to customize what we want, and Nasuni should provide the commands or a place in the GUI to do it.

We've been using the solution for about a year. 

The solution is stable; the S3 bucket isn't going to break down, and we're on new servers running off a Linux kernel, so they shouldn't go down either. We have yet to experience any issues with the stability. 

The product is very scalable. I do wish we could throw more master volume owners on one device, as it's limited to 16 or eight if it's user-facing.

We contact customer support weekly, and the company representative who deals with us is excellent; he knows what he's talking about. They run through details with us and regularly teach us about the product. We can ask many questions, and Nasuni is more like an automatic transmission car than a manual, which is as it's supposed to be.

Before Nasuni, we used traditional Microsoft tools and didn't necessarily switch. It's more of a slow upgrade process; we use Nasuni for all newer sites and will continue to do so going forward.

The initial deployment is relatively straightforward; the only complexity comes from our internal rules around traffic flow and quality of service, but Nasuni itself has nothing to do with that. The server comes pre-configured, we do the volume, it's without glitches, and connecting to the NNC is fine.

The last two deployments I worked on took almost six months for a full deployment. It's important to remember we are a massive company, so much waiting is involved, and things take time. If someone wants to spool up a VM here, it could take months for that to happen; this is a very controlled environment, we can't afford mistakes, security is tight, and many checks and balances exist.

We evaluated other options, but I was not involved in the process. We looked at many products, including Commvault and online tools, as there are a lot of choices when it comes to backup and recovery, incremental backup, and file-sharing solutions. Ultimately, our requirement was for a product that could be solely internal and would not go over the internet, so Nasuni fit the bill.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Nasuni's analytics connector provides analytics, including what data is flowing. We can access that locally and in the cloud from wherever the filers are.

Regarding data protection, we use the solution's built-in antivirus but not exclusively; we also have other tools to scan the data. We have it as an extra layer of protection, but otherwise, secure files as we usually would.

We use Nasuni Access Anywhere, but we may not need it. As we use an SD-WAN solution, Nasuni tacked a CNAME on the device so we can access the shares. Therefore, we can use both of those.

Regarding simplicity of management, I'm not involved in the daily management, but I suspect it isn't as glitchy as Oracle ZFS. ZFS is horrible; it works, but good luck fixing it if it breaks. Nasuni is probably better because it's a newer platform built on a Linux kernel.

If we didn't have Nasuni, we would instead have some kind of file server, attached storage maybe with a RAID, and then push that to AWS in a blob or S3 bucket. We could do much of what Nasuni does in other ways, but it would be more complicated; it would be less clean and easy. Having a unified platform to handle everything is much better. Regarding hardware elimination, the solution doesn't really do that; we could eliminate the hardware, but that leads to other problems and is less cost-effective.  

In terms of cloud migration, I've done lift and shift projects, and I was more involved in the management side. I've also been involved in Azure projects, including AAD, hybrid AD, and some Intune rollouts.  

To a colleague at another company who has concerns about migration to the cloud and the solution's performance, I would say the performance is related to your WAN, hardware, and user demands; it's not the product that will limit you. Regarding the cloud concerns, your data is safer in the cloud; I've never heard of a company losing their data in an S3 bucket due to an Amazon mistake, for example.  

To those considering implementing the solution, I recommend you have your infrastructure properly set up before, depending on the security requirements. Putting the solution in a VLAN and the filer in a different VLAN is a consideration. I also recommend buying enough storage for future capacity, testing the data, and not skimping on storage; it's better to lean toward generosity here. For product-specific advice, I recommend being prepared for some learning; taking the time to learn how Nasuni works and how to support it post-deployment is essential. As with everything, it will take a little time, a few months or so, so be prepared for an investment of time and planning.

We have multiple physical locations and we had to find an alternative data repository so that we could transition from some legacy technology like Microsoft StorSimple. We needed a cloud-native solution that would be more cost-effective than some of the other vendors out there. We ended up going with Nasuni primarily for file server access for three locations within Australia.

Nasuni is helping us replace multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. We are still in the transition stage for some of our locations. We're doing away with the Microsoft StorSimple services, which is being retired at the end of the year. We have an HPE Unity SAN at one of our locations, and because that used to store all the data, we have had to have backup technology to replicate it. We're doing away with both of them and simplifying our infrastructure in that location to accommodate just a small caching appliance. And there's an FTP capability that we're looking to investigate for some of our infrastructure components.

Also, we have reduced the IT risk in our recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. In the event of a disaster, we're able to bring up the infrastructure in a different location very quickly. In addition, we can have access to this data in a site-survivability mode in our manufacturing area. That means that for a period of time, the data that's cached on those appliances will happily be used by that office, should the network become isolated from the internet.

Another benefit is that, compared to what we had before, from a dashboarding perspective, we get really good visibility within the Nasuni console. We also have much better assurances around the backups and the mechanisms assuring that the data is actually being securely stored, based on our rules, with various tools and backup solutions. There were many different places where we used to get that information and that just wasn't efficient.

One of our guiding principles, when it comes to architecture, is to ensure that we have immutable backups of all of our data. Historically, we were able to do that for everything except for our file servers. We still leveraged legacy capabilities for that. By moving to Nasuni, we were able to ensure that the backups are immutable and retained for a period of time without being impacted. That gives us assurance that, in the event of a ransomware attack, we're able not only to restore the data or make it accessible, but we're also able to provide a different mechanism for users to access the data in a disaster recovery scenario. That can be done by using the web interface rather than having to establish network connectivity.

Nasuni has also helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We're simplifying the infrastructure we deploy and, as part of that process, we're able to then repurpose it. For example, we currently have SAN storage attached to the network and we had a couple of NAS appliances. We consolidated all of that into a virtualization stack that only has to store a minimal amount of caching data. That saves us hours a week from managing the backups and ensuring that they work. When we do restore testing, we only have to test a finite amount of data because it's one system working for many different areas. It's considerably easier. There was a little bit of a learning curve to understand how the new technology works, but the implementer helped us with that.

It has also decreased capital costs in the sense that we don't have to renew the purchasing of additional specific hardware for it. The last SAN storage appliance that we purchased cost $180,000 four and a half years ago, and it is coming up for retirement and decommissioning. Nasuni is not a complete replacement, as we'll be replacing that SAN with some virtualization infrastructure, but that will be co-shared and used by a number of different systems and applications. We're taking away a storage appliance, but adding more capacity and more processing power for use with more systems.

We effectively subscribe to the storage where that is saved. As a result, from a cash flow perspective, we're clearer. We're not having a large capital investment for the storage appliance. And we also have the assurance that it is considerably more redundant than what we used previously.

The disaster recovery capabilities are very easy because their virtual appliances are just like OVFs or images. You put in a code and it collects all the configuration from the cloud and then builds up the cache. But that doesn't preclude the device from easily being restored or recovered at short notice. It also means, from a security-patching perspective, that we don't have to add any additional processes like managing a Windows Server or having agents on it. We can simply rebuild those or upgrade those agents.

The storage that we're deploying it to is in Azure, but one of the key features of Nasuni is the fact that we can actually change the location of that storage when it becomes cost-prohibited to have it in Azure, and we can find equally reliable but cost-effective places. A good example would be Wasabi storage services. They don't have regions in Australia, but should they get regions in Australia, they are considerably cheaper than what Azure, AWS, and GCP offer. We have that flexibility.

Nasuni also provides file storage capacity anywhere it's needed on-demand and without any limits. What we've found is that a lot of our storage is dormant and not actively used. Nasuni gives us really good insights into the usage of the data and enables us to store that data in an immutable secured location. The flexibility is there and the level of data that we can send to it is exceptionally high. The importance of this feature is about a six out of 10 for us. That's because our volume of data is actually decreasing year-on-year, specifically in those types of data repositories. We are exponentially growing on data stored in cloud services, like Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, but that's a different technology stack.

Migration from existing systems, specifically StorSimple, could be improved, but that solution will be end-of-life by the end of the year. 

Also, the documentation could be more accessible.

It's a pretty good product, overall. It's hard to find something specific that they really have to focus on.

I have been using Nasuni for a couple of months.

So far, we've had no problems with its stability.

We're assessing whether we're going to deploy it throughout Asia as well. But strategically, we're moving away from this type of storage. We're looking to leverage more cloud-based collaborative storage. The primary reason is that we don't have the necessary use cases for really large storage connectivity, like CAD or design drawings. Our usage of Nasuni will actually become lower and lower over time as we transition business processes.

Their tech support is quite busy at the moment with everyone trying to outsource storage. We can give them a little bit of leniency on that.

Positive

We had a risk around an end-of-life technology and we brought in Nasuni and we transitioned to it within a week and a half.

The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest thing that we had to focus on was transitioning our existing snapshot backups. They definitely had some guidance on how to do that and that helped. The technology side was straightforward. Some of the business decisions that we had to make were more complex. For example, how comfortable were we in keeping some of the data that we had in our old system and getting rid of some of the other data?

Compared to what we used to have, this solution is significantly simpler. The deployment of the caching appliances is very easy, as is redeploying them. From an infrastructure perspective, that's quite straightforward. We don't have the hardware appliances, but I believe they are equally easy to manage.

Our deployment is a combination. In one location it's on-premises, but it's in a virtualized environment. We are deploying components in our core data center, which is a co-lo with our virtualization infrastructure.

While a 360-degree view is going to be a stretch, it does allow us to have all of our file repositories centrally managed in one administrative console. It doesn't cater to data classifications and data loss prevention, but from an object storage point of view and a management perspective, it definitely works.

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.

It is mainly used for file storage.

I belong to the administration part of the storage team who use it to handle all the file servers and the SAN storage. I manage a team who handles the day-to-day tasks of Nasuni. We have multiple teams who take care of our work on the Nasuni. There is a separate team who works on deployment and another separate team who handles the BAU tasks. So, we have different teams who work on different parts.

Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We were using about eight to 10 different types of vendors or small storage boxes for provisioning and shared access for users. We got rid of all those. That has eliminated the footprint and operational overhead at our data center. We don't have to worry about any hardware or monitoring particular devices, and hundreds of devices have been decommissioned. Now, for provisioning, everything is on Nasuni. I assume this has made a big difference in costs.

It is without limit. It grows per the need. In one year, I haven't seen anybody requesting any new spaces yet.

We use the Continuous File Versioning feature. Restoration is quite simple. Because of Continuous File Versioning, there are any number of snapshots available with the settings that we have chosen. There is always a backup ready, and all we have to do is find a previous one that is ready to be recovered.

Previously it was a tough job working on hardware, volumes, shares, or anything that was managed by us. Now, it is the same task, but the ease with which we do it is better with Continuous File Versioning. All we have to do is log into the console, find what needs to be recovered, and then use that for recovery.

The user-friendliness of its access needs improvement. When I log into the console, I see all the files that we handle globally. There are hundreds of Nasuni files that I can see on the console, but no way that I can filter them down. While this is a small thing, I need to scroll down and select the ones that I want. "Control F" doesn't work nor is there a dropdown menu that I can click on and select the ones that I want. 

There are some things that we are really looking forward to. For example, we recently had an issue related to the COW disk. Only the Nasuni back-end team can check and see which out of the LANs or volumes provision from ESX is exactly the COW disk. We don't have visibility into that. There are certain things that are only visible to the back-end team of Nasuni, but I feel that we should, as a user, also have visibility into it.

I have been using it for a year.

We haven't seen any kind of outages related to Nasuni. Stability-wise, it has been great.

We don't have to worry about scalability. 

At the moment, we are backing up or protecting about 10 to 15 terabytes. 

We plan to get every NAS box that we have off existing devices that are end-of-life and used for file provisioning. We plan to move those to Nasuni.

I would rate Nasuni support somewhere between eight or nine out of 10 because sometimes we face issues in getting support from Nasuni. For example, if I am running a P1, then I call up Nasuni support but don't get immediate support. We then have to wait until somebody gets back to us. When we get support, it is good, but waiting is the issue.

Before Nasuni, we had NAS file servers from different vendors, e.g., Dell EMC and NetApp. We also had small-time, consumer NAS boxes, like QNAP, Synology, etc. It was quite uncomfortable and tedious, as well as the toughest way, to monitor all these vendors with different technologies and features, just to provide a file share to the user. This is something that has been tremendously reduced since dealing with just Nasuni and nothing else.

It was a tedious process of getting a change approved, looking into the available space, whether the storage had enough space for provisioning additional space to be requested. It used to take probably a time window of anywhere between seven to 10 days, if there was space available on the existing storage. If not, then it was another task that would go for months to procure new storage to add in more capacity. Nasuni has eased our job because we don't have to worry about the user requests for additional space anymore.

When we had NetApp, we had more control of it from a hardware perspective, but there were a lot of negative aspects to it. 

With Nasuni, as an administrator, my life is easy. The only issue that we are currently dealing with is about some access or permission-related issues. There are a whole lot of issues that we do not even have to look into it anymore: 

• People are not getting back to us that they need more space. 
• People are not getting back to us to tell us if there are hardware failures that we need to fix. 
• They are not coming back to tell us that there are some hardware issues going on, which probably might affect the data, data integrity, or probably cause data loss. 

So, there are many other things that we are not even hearing about right now. It has greatly reduced the amount of issues that we have had from previous solutions.

I have heard that it is easy to configure the solution to support organizational changes.

My team doesn't get involved. We have a separate team who takes care of deployments.

Unless you know that you have something better, I would say, "Go for it," in regards to Nasuni.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.