Nasuni Reviews

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 have multiple use cases. We have a lot of user data from users who share Excel files, Word files, et cetera. It is often used for their home directories, for Windows, and their folders and shared folders.

We also use it for test data.

And at remote sites where there are SQL backups, we'll dump those backups into it to get them offsite, because it's mirrored to AWS.

We also have users with multi-protocol files. They run CE solvers and the results get transferred to Nasuni and then they can get to them from wherever they are.

Nasuni has replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single, global file system. Once the data is in Nasuni and the users are using it, we don't have to worry about updating Windows File Servers anymore. We don't have to worry about disparate methods of access, where people are asking, "Where is this file server? Why can't I get to it?" It makes operations easier.

And the ease of backups is even more important than that, knowing data is protected. We used to chase down file servers everywhere, but now we don't have to worry about that.

Another one of the biggest benefits is the resiliency. Nasuni means our users have more uptime. We have a lot of little plants and we would often hear from them, "Oh, the file server here is down." There might only be five guys there, but now that happens way less often. It just runs. The reliability, for the users, is big.

And the Continuous File Versioning means that recovery from ransomware would be way faster. Fortunately, we haven't had any ransomware attacks since bringing up Nasuni, but in the cases where we've had to restore files for people, it's so fast that we know that if there were a ransomware attack, it would be the same situation. Also, this feature has alleviated concerns about timely backups and restores. It's affected our operations by giving us more confidence that everything is protected.

In addition, the users are always ecstatic when we show them that they can get something back themselves and that they can go to the one from yesterday or a week ago. They love it.

Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure and that has been a cost-leveler. The overall cost is lower.

But the biggest thing is that we don't have to worry about budget cycles so much anymore. Instead of having to deal with spending a million dollars every five years, it's just a monthly bill now. It just runs. In terms of cash flow, compared to buying fixed assets through a hardware refresh, it has made things a lot easier to predict. It also simplifies infrastructure purchasing and support requirements, lowering the cost and allowing us to centralize things more.

The most important feature is that things are backed up automatically in AWS. We have a lot of remote sites where there is a tiny server onsite and, in a lot of cases, we really don't have to back them up because the data is automatically copied to AWS. The cloud replication is the most useful functionality for us.

In terms of file storage capacity, it enables us to provide it anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. We just tell the users it'll cost you a little bit for every file, and go for it. They don't have to control it anymore. That's very important because it makes budget cycles easier. We, in IT, don't have to get involved in that anymore. We hand it off and say, "Okay, you guys are getting a bill every month," and we don't have to think about it.

The performance monitoring could be improved.

I have been using Nasuni for about 18 months.

We have a very good impression of the stability, so far.

The scalability is also very good. We haven't hit any brick walls. Almost everybody in our company, and we have thousands of employees, uses it in some way. They might not know that they're using it, but their files are on it.

The technical support is very good. It's definitely one of the better support teams that I've had to deal with.

Positive

We did not have a similar product. We used Windows plus VMware plus EMC storage. Now, we have a single server with a filer. It didn't really replace anything directly but you could say it replaced Windows File Servers.

Deployment required two guys over a long period of time. At this point, we have five people who know it very well and maintain it.

There is a learning curve. The disadvantage is that it's a whole new thing. You can't interview for a Windows guy and then say, "Here you go. Take care of this file server." But once you know it, any one person can take care of way more data.

ROI is hard to talk about because it's apples to oranges. In some areas, we have definitely seen ROI. For example, in user productivity when they say, "I need this file from yesterday," and we can say, "We have it," as opposed to, "I'm sorry, all we have is last week," there is ROI. We have also seen it in terms of reducing backup licensing.

Use Nasuni for a project. Pick a category, use it for that, and watch it for six months. Like a lot of cloud solutions, you don't really know what the ongoing costs of it, plus AWS, are. It's hard to determine what it will really cost you until you have used it and you see what the bills are. It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap.

Years ago we looked at NetApp and one other solution. After the evaluation, those solutions just weren't quite ready. They didn't quite do everything we wanted done.

Then, about two years went by and we decided to do another round and we picked Nasuni. It seemed mature enough at that point and we haven't really compared it to anything else since then. It's done the job.

If a colleague at another company said he had concerns about the solution's performance on the cloud, I would tell him that to achieve performance X, you can do it with less need for horsepower onsite with Nasuni. If you're replacing a solution, you don't generally need hardware upgrades to do it.

Overall, there isn't much missing from Nasuni. It's good stuff.

We are using it as shared storage so that our users can share data between multiple departments.

We used to have different storage platforms for different regions, but using Nasuni we can actually use one storage platform for our customers who are at different locations so that they can share data. We now have a single global file system. That is really important from both the financial and the maintenance perspectives. We don't need to engage multiple engineers when things are done by a single product.

And the Continuous File Versioning has enabled us to meet our SLAs with our customers. We can deploy snapshots as frequently as we want to match our SLAs.

Continuous File Versioning is one of the best features because it helps you to restore at any point in time. That means you don't have to worry about a ransomware attack. Even if that attack happens, you can restore all the data to five minutes ago and save everything. That restore feature is the most valuable. You can restore in seconds. 

Also, the ability for sharing between multiple regions is important.

Nasuni is not SOC 2 compliant and it needs to be.

Another issue, because it's a cache-based mechanism in the cloud, is that while it keeps some files in cache and some files in the cloud, it doesn't tell which files are in the cache.

In addition, there is no reporting feature available, so we have to generate manual reports of the folder utilization.

It also doesn't have monitoring solutions. They want to do the monitoring of Nasuni using TIV stack, but implementing that takes a lot of time. For every single new filer, I have to deploy the alerting dashboard.

I've been using Nasuni for six months.

The stability is good. I have not seen any issues with its stability.

It's scalable but it's not easy to scale. It's not that simple to manage because it involves size-wise expansion. If we have to add more customers, we have to deploy more filers and that takes time and is not that simple to do. You will end up having some overloaded filers and some filers without load. The scaling process is not good and they don't have any tools to help us scale, so it's trial and error.

It takes at least an hour or so to deploy a new filer, which is a really bad thing. Because it's on the cloud, you should be able to do it in five minutes, but that doesn't happen with Nasuni.

We are currently using it extensively. We have about 20 appliances and we are planning to deploy 10 more in the future.

Customer support is good. Priority-two tickets and lower are handled by customer support via email. I have only had to use the email support so far.

Positive

We were using ZFS Storage but we replaced it with Nasuni. We switched because of the capacity constraints. We needed more capacity and there was a limitation with the ZFS Storage.

It is difficult to configure Nasuni. Adding a filer is an easy task, but deciding where to add them, how many to add, and what size to add takes a lot of time. I have to analyze my existing storage to understand how many users are going to access which folders. I have to design the Nasuni architecture accordingly.

The initial deployment took four to five hours.

I had to deploy multiple Nasuni edge appliances onto the cloud, in the different regions, and then join them with Azure Blob Storage.

We deployed it with the help of Nasuni employees.

We have only had Nasuni for six months so I cannot say that I have seen any cost savings. Even if it doesn't necessarily cost that much, the Azure Ultra Disks are costly.

Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low.

We evaluated SoftNAS and Azure NetApp Files before opting for Nasuni.

The advantages of Nasuni are the cost and better restore capabilities when compared to the other products. The drawbacks of it are the implementation and designing of the architecture. 

If you don't have multiple users or if performance is not a key for your deployment, go for Nasuni storage. In those circumstances it is good. But if you need performance with less latency, you should go with another solution.

The use case specifically is to allow our engineering staff in different offices to be able to work collaboratively on the same projects at the same time. Also, another important feature for us is the ability to recover or restore data from any point in time in its history.

We have Nasuni Filers deployed at each of our offices in the US and another location in India. Nasuni is used by our engineering staff and where production engineering data is stored.

The cloud is used for synchronization from site to site as well as for backup and storing all our snapshot historical data.

We use different cloud providers for different things. Currently, hard Nasuni data is in AWS.

We use it for VDI. VDI is the direction that we are going throughout the company for consistency and user experience for DR and DC capabilities. Having the Nasuni Filers be a central element supporting the VDI solution has enabled us to have all our engineers work collaboratively in a very tightly integrated total solution.

It is very rare that we need to make significant changes to the Nasuni infrastructure to support organizational changes. On a day-to-day basis, there are new projects added across various design teams in the company. Those can be set up in seconds in Nasuni. It is just very easy to work with it. In essence, setting up the basic file structures just looks like another volume that has been shared on the network. Through the console, we can configure Global File Lock permissions for how those files can be accessed from site to site.

One of its most valuable features would be the Global File Lock capability, which is what enables our engineers to be able to work on projects collaboratively from site to site.

Nasuni offers us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data, which is definitely important to us. It simplifies IT operations tremendously. Because it is taking continuous snapshots, it eliminates a lot of work that was previously done when trying to manage backing up and restoring data files.

It is far less labor intensive than our previous processes. There is a console interface that is used for managing all the data repositories, what is in the cache of each appliance, the Global File Lock parameters and settings, the ability to recover files, etc. The single pane of glass interface manages all those capabilities. Things can be done in minutes through the Nasuni Management Console, which previously would have been a more labor-intensive effort with more manual processes.

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it is needed, on-demand, and without limits. We have it deployed on Nasuni appliances at our offices, but we also have the ability to create virtual Nasuni Filers that potentially could be deployed anywhere in our infrastructure.

Nasuni provides Continuous File Versioning down to the granularity of the snapshots, which occur about every 15 minutes. If there was a ransomware or other disaster type of event, only the data in the cache on the local appliance would be affected. The entire snapshot history of every file is backed up in the cloud. We can, on a file-by-file, directory-by-directory, or volume basis, recover any or all files from that snapshot history back into the local appliance. The only impact would be the time to copy the data back from the cloud snapshot back into the local appliance.

Because these snapshots occur so frequently, we can recover data to a point very shortly before the time a person wants to recover that data, e.g., within 15 minutes of when whatever happened. If somebody deletes a file or accidentally moves/loses it, then we are able to recover it within 15 minutes of that point in time. Very little data, if any, is lost with this type of operation. This has greatly relieved any concerns about IT backups and restores to the point where it is a very minimal concern. 

It frees up IT staff to work on other initiatives, because these are automated processes that occur in the background and require minimal attention, if any at all, from IT staff.

One area where Nasuni has made huge strides over the last year and a half is the time required to synchronize data from site to site. This has gone down quite a lot, but we always would like it to occur faster. 

I would like to see Nasuni provide the ability to mirror a Nasuni appliance from one site to another. They could maybe have a standby appliance that is mirrored in a different location for disaster recovery purposes. We can recover if data and a Filer are lost because of a possible ransomware event, but even that takes time to recover. If we had the ability to have a mirrored appliance, we could flip over to that mirrored device and resume instantly rather than repopulate the local appliance with data from the snapshot history in the cloud. This is another feature that we would really like to see, if possible.

I would like the ability to roll back to a prior version of the firmware, e.g., if you had a problem when you were upgrading to a newer version. They do not have this capability. This is less of a concern than it used to be. It is a much more mature product, but this would always be a very nice feature to have.

We have been using it longer than I have been in the IT management role here. I can estimate it at eight or nine years in total.

For the last several years, it has been very stable. There have been no issues.

Deployment and maintenance need a very tiny fraction of an FTE. With everything that we are doing with the appliance, it is probably a couple of hours a week.

Scalability is seemingly limitless in terms of the number of places where appliances could be deployed as well as the amount of data that can be handled. The only limitation is the amount of cache memory that is on the local appliance. So, if you needed to keep a very large amount of current data in the local cache memory, you might need to deploy multiple appliances at a site. However, it basically uses a first-in, first-out methodology for what data is kept in the cache. Any data that has been accessed or modified recently is in the cache. If it is not in the cache, it will pull it into the appliance from the snapshot history and replace the data that was accessed the longest time ago which is remaining in the local cache. However, any data can be brought into the local cache to the appliance. Therefore, we have been able to completely work within the bounds of an appliance at a given site.

All of our engineering staff are using it: designers, engineers, project managers, building information modeling (BIM) staff, and technicians. That is around 240 people in our firm.

It is being about as extensive used as it can get. It is used across all our engineering staff, covering all active project-related files. That is the extent to which we tend to deploy it. There are other file systems being used for other purposes, but we don't have the same kind of needs that would warrant using a Nasuni appliance for something like that, like we do for this. So, the Nasuni infrastructure is used really for the most business-critical applications.

Previously, the company used traditional file storage systems and big tape backup systems.

Nasuni replaced multiple older file systems and manual tape backup solutions. This has been absolutely business-critical because of the type of data that is stored on there, e.g., all our engineering client project information is stored there. Also, it is extremely resilient. It allows us to recover files if there was ever either accidental or malicious loss of data. For loss of data of any type, we have the ability to recover that data from the entire snapshot history on any file. So, Nasuni is important for day-to-day activities as well as providing disaster recovery capability on any data stored on it.

Before having the solution, it just would not have been possible to have staff in multiple offices be able to work collaboratively in some of these design applications at the same time. So, Nasuni was critical to enabling that capability, which increased productivity, allowing us to share resources more effectively across offices. Also, prior to having the Nasuni solution, if engineers wished to restore data to a prior point in time, we were limited by the capabilities of our previous tape backup solutions. This means they were not as granular as Nasuni. Our granularity is down to about 15-minute increments in time, where it might have been daily with the old tape backup solution. Nasuni is quicker when recovering data from any point in time than was ever possible with prior tape backup solutions.

Nasuni has replaced other on-premise infrastructure. It has replaced traditional file storage and tape backup solutions with a simple 2U appliance that has storage integrated into it and is connected back to the cloud for all the snapshot data.

We did have assistance from Nasuni to get the devices configured initially. It wasn't an enormously complex process. 

We did have Nasuni Professional Services help with the initial setup.

Nasuni certainly has reduced labor costs associated with managing all the data and how we manage client project data. It has greatly reduced the labor efforts and costs associated with that. It has also turned out to be a very reliable solution. As site-to-site sync performances have improved, that has enhanced the productivity for all our engineers as well.

Before Nasuni, the time investment was critical and a daily activity. It took a fair bit of time to prepare, load tapes, catalogue items, and run backups every day. Now, with Nasuni, the only time spent is when we have to customize the Global File Lock permissions for certain folders (for the engineers) so the Global File Lock mechanisms work correctly. This is a one-time activity that occurs when a project is set up and completed in minutes.

Nasuni has decreased capital costs because you don’t need to buy as much excess capacity. The CapEx cost is definitely lower with Nasuni. It is only when we either need to upgrade an appliance in an office or if we need to purchase appliances for new offices that there are CapEx costs. The rest of it is an OpEx cost.

It has reduced capital costs by over 80%.

There are annual costs that we pay for maintaining all of the snapshot history in the cloud. That is the primary cost that we pay. We occasionally buy newer Nasuni appliances or deploy them to new offices when the need occurs. That capital equipment expenses is less than the cost of buying new file storage systems. For the most part, you are trading a CapEx cost of storage equipment for an OpEx cost for management of all the snapshot data in the cloud. There are CapEx and OpEx elements to both solutions: 

• With the old school solution, you have an OpEx expense for tapes, which is relatively small. With Nasuni, you have an OpEX cost for the data in the cloud, which is larger. 
• With the old school solution, you have CapEx costs for storage equipment, which are large. With Nasuni, you have a CapEx expense when you need to purchase new appliances for offices, which is relatively small. 

It is kind of a trade off with similar costs either way.

The snapshot history backed up in the cloud is an annual OpEX expense. Occasionally we have to bump it up because the amount of storage required for all our snapshot history increases over time, but the infrastructure purchasing and support requirements are definitely simpler.

We do hardware refreshes on Nasuni appliances. So, that is not a buy it once and you're done forever kind of thing. The majority of the cost with the Nasuni is an OpEx cost for storage of all the snapshot history.

I think the pricing on the appliances is completely reasonable and fair. I have had no issues with it. 

Keep in mind that Nasuni allows their clients to choose what cloud platform all the snapchat history is saved on. Depending on the cloud platforms that your company uses, or if there are standards on such things, there may be some benefits to looking at alternative cloud providers for storing the snapshot history, because there may be some savings to be had there. At the same time, because they have that flexibility and support several different cloud platform vendors, if your company is standardized on a particular cloud vendor, then odds are Nasuni is already supported in it.

The costs are the standard licensing fees and subscription for the total size of the data repository (for the snapshot history in the cloud).

We looked at Panzura too.

The cloud piece is almost transparent to the user. Because you are interacting through the Nasuni Management Console, you are not really working directly with that cloud provider solution to access files. You could, if you wish, but you can do everything that you need to do directly through the Nasuni Management Console. The cloud happens to be the place where the data is stored and you don't necessarily need to interact with it directly.

Keep in mind the amount of data that you need to keep in your cache. So, sizing your appliance for the local cache storage needs to meet your day-to-day needs, but your actual needs are probably less than what you think they might be. If you had the ability to store 30-days worth of data in the local cache appliance, you are probably in pretty good shape. I definitely would try to understand exactly what the needs of your business are. If you have site-to-site replication needs, carefully consider the capabilities of any particular solution to make sure that the vendors that you are considering can deliver on that as well as how easy it is to work with those vendors for restoring data, if you ever needed to do that.

We haven't tried going back to a more traditional solution. This solution has done a fantastic job of meeting all our needs. Overall, we are just very happy with Nasuni.

I would rate Nasuni as nine out of 10, but I am a tough grader. It is hard to get a 10.

We needed a solution that would allow our 12 offices to collaborate from one central location of active business data that is continuously synchronized and backed up. This is the problem that Nasuni solved for us.

Our environment includes Nasuni's cloud-based file storage called UniFS, and at each site, we have a filer on-premise. Our normal SAN/NAS refresh cycle at each office location was 3 to 5 years. This IT work involved a lot of time, effort, and cost involving research, planning, and deployment of the properly sized SAN/NAS. With Nasuni, this hardware refresh cycle has literally stopped. Our capacity now scales on-demand.

Prior to Nasuni, each office had its own on-premises file server and there was no real collaboration on a single set of data. We had data silos operating independently at each location and when we would win a project, it was very difficult to collaborate between offices. Nasuni came in and looked at all our offices and data within our workflows and made the requisite recommendations. In the end, all of our active business data was consolidated and synchronized into one universal ‘global’ drive that was automatically backed up every 15 minutes and accessible by all staff in all offices.

With Nasuni, we have been able to replace multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system, which is important to us because we have been able to consolidate several different products and solutions. Prior to Nasuni, the normal mode of operations in IT was to employ several products to use with critical business data. For example, we have to store it, back it up, think about disaster recovery, and think about how different employees collaborate on the same data at the same time. Each of these problems required different products.

Nasuni solves your storage, backup, disaster recovery, and file sync/collaboration needs in one product/solution.

Thankfully, we have not had to use it for a ransomware attack or disaster situation. But the risk of data loss due to a ransomware attack is significantly mitigated knowing we can restore our data to within 15 minutes of the last Nasuni ‘snapshot’. We also use Nasuni on a weekly basis for simple file restores. With Nasuni, in two clicks you can restore a file. 

Prior to Nasuni, we had a completely separate software package that we purchased for data backups. This is not required any longer. As such, our IT environment is simpler and more cost-effective.

We don't use Nasuni exclusively for VDI but we do have VDI components. This is very important to us because we've been using VMware for almost 20 years.

With regard to the simplicity of management, the Nasuni Management Console makes everything very simple. Related to that is the support that we received during our implementation, as well as the ongoing support that we get whenever we have any questions about configuration or otherwise.

Nasuni has helped to simplify infrastructure purchasing and support requirements, starting with the fact that we no longer do our regular SAN refresh every three to five years. Also, we are now dealing with one vendor, rather than multiple vendors for our storage solution.

Anybody that knows about storage products will understand how they just fill up because users create more data than you have a plan for. A storage upgrade is a big IT project and we haven't had to do one for almost three years. Having the benefit of being able to forgo one of these projects saves us hundreds of hours each time.

When compared to having to do SAN refreshes, Nasuni contributes positively to business agility. When you have to plan for an IT update project, it requires time and effort. With Nasuni in place, that need goes away because the technology automatically backs up the data, synchronizes it, and maintains version control for disaster recovery. From that perspective, the business is much more agile.

One of the most valuable features is scalability. As time goes on and we begin to run out of disk space, and we start planning for deployments and upgrades, Nasuni really helps. One of the things that we love about this product in IT is that it looks at your data and identifies what is active, or what is being worked on. We can set a threshold in terms of time where, for example, if the data has not been opened or touched for at least a year then it is automatically backed up to the cloud. By doing that, it's constantly keeping your file servers lean, which means that you don't have to regularly buy new storage upgrades.

Because we don't have to continue to buy storage as we did before, Nasuni has partially helped to eliminate our on-premises infrastructure. In this regard, it has reduced our SAN refresh costs. It is difficult to estimate how much we have saved because each office had its own SAN and storage requirements prior to Nasuni, and I would have to look into how much we paid for that infrastructure. Easily, we have saved six figures.

Aside from costs, Nasuni has reduced the amount of effort that we spend on our storage solution. The IT works and planning that's involved whenever you're doing a storage upgrade or a SAN refresh is significant. It becomes a month-long project. Having Nasuni manage active data versus inactive data has meant that we haven't bought a SAN since we implemented Nasuni in 2018.

Some of the other valuable features are collaboration and disaster recovery.

Nasuni gives us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data, which is very important to us. It is called the Nasuni Management Console and we have everything that we need to look at in a single pane of glass. From an IT administration standpoint, there's nothing worse than having to hop onto different toolsets or different solutions to manage different things. With regards to data management, specifically, we work through the Nasuni Management Console and everything is managed from there.

The speed at which new files are created is something that could be improved. For example, if you create a new file in another country, I won't see it for between 10 and 15 minutes. The length of time that it takes depends on the speed of the internet. If it were to drop from 15 minutes to two minutes, that would be fantastic. However, I understand that there are a lot of variables involved. As such, it's probably not just Nasuni but also the speed of the internet.

We have been using Nasuni since November 2018.

Stability-wise, it has been top-notch. We haven't had any issues whatsoever. When we first implemented it, we had the occasional questions about the length of time required to create a new file. We thought that it might be quicker.

Nasuni is used daily. Literally, all of our business-critical data resides on it, so the availability has to be there 24/7/365.

Scaling is just a matter of contacting Nasuni and telling them that we need more storage. After that, they allocate it. We're using Azure, whereas some people use Amazon AWS or Google. It doesn’t matter to Nasuni which ‘backend’ you use.

We have approximately 450 users and the roles range from engineers to project managers, to administration, marketing, IT, and finance. We don't have any plans to increase usage. As the company grows, it doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to be doing anything different. We may just have to buy more Nasuni storage.

We have a small IT team of approximately four people that was responsible for the deployment and takes care of the maintenance. There is not much maintenance that needs to be done. It involves system updates and going into the Nasuni Management Console to check log files.

We received helpful support during our implementation, as well as ongoing support whenever we have questions. We also have access to Nasuni’s senior leadership team, which is fantastic!

We did not use another product prior to implementing Nasuni.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Nasuni comes in and they look at your data. They do an assessment and then they give you a report that estimates your sizing based on the total data that you have, as well as the amount of data that is actively being worked on at any given point in time. For example, you may have five terabytes of data but there is only 1TB that is being actively used.

With assistance from Nasuni in classifying our data as active versus inactive, we were able to then size a proper solution and purchase the right amount of storage that we need both in the cloud and on-premises.

The implementation strategy was just a matter of sizing the environment and then copying data from a traditional file server to the Nasuni file server. It took about a month for us to complete. This included sizing the environment for each location, making sure each one had a Nasuni filter, then communicating to staff that we were going to be moving data from one location to another.

The moving of data is something that we did on a weekend and the staff were told that when they came back to work on Monday, they would automatically be pointing to a different location for their data.

Nasuni assisted us with the implementation. We did not rely on a third party.

Not having to purchase storage each year has helped to reduce our capital costs. We no longer have to do our SAN refresh cycles.

We analyzed our ROI when we first purchased the solution and although I can't share the actual costs, I can say that the primary savings are in the time and effort involved to do the SAN refreshes. This is not to mention buying the SAN in the first place. A safe estimate would be savings in the six-figure range.

The cost of licensing is negotiated and billed annually per terabyte. Different clients have different pricing, depending on their agreements.

In general, the pricing is straightforward and it's an all-inclusive price with no surprises. There is no charge for additional features, add-ons, or otherwise. The fact that it's one price for all of the technology is something else that we like a lot about this product.

Prior to implementing Nasuni, we evaluated Panzura. It is the direct competitor in the market. In our opinion, the Nasuni technology was better. The cost for the product and the cost to implement was significantly less with Nasuni, although the primary reason that we chose it was the technology.

When we saw the demo, we were more impressed with what we saw with Nasuni as compared to Panzura. We were also much more impressed with Nasuni’s representation in terms of how they communicated with us promptly and honestly.

When it comes to configuring Nasuni to support organizational changes, the technology is very easy to implement. What's more difficult in any organization is communicating and implementing workflow changes required due to the new data structure. Human nature dictates that we are naturally resistant to change, especially in an organization that has workflows in place for a long time. As such, be sure to involve as many key stakeholders in your company as possible in order to communicate the many benefits of the project. With proper buy-in, the chances of any IT project succeeding are greatly increased.

Today, all of our employees realize that we now have what's called a "global drive", and this is where all of the data can be found. What used to frustrate people, understandably, is that if we're collaborating, they would go to their local office's file server and it wouldn't be there. Rather than stored locally, a file might be on the "British Columbia" server, or instead on the "Alberta" server. Consolidating all of the data and then communicating to staff that there's only ever now one location where that data or that file can be found, really simplifies finding and retrieving the file that people are looking for. Data structure simplification through consolidation and classification goes a very long way to removing friction for the end user when trying to find a file.

I have recommended Nasuni to many colleagues, and I point out that if they have any sort of multi-site collaboration problem, or if they're thinking of disaster recovery, business continuity, or backup solutions, or if they're tired of refreshing their SAN, then Nasuni is an excellent choice.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Nasuni is to take your time at doing the assessment and classifying your data. This is something that Nasuni helps with. Then, once you have a good understanding of the data classification, take time to get an understanding of everybody's workflow and what they expect things will be like post-change. If this is done correctly and you take your time then the implementation will go a lot smoother. If instead you just rip off the band-aid and do something, and then people wake up Monday and there are all sorts of changes, chaos is imminent.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use Nasuni to provide storage at various locations. It is for office-type files that they would use for day-to-day office work, such as spreadsheets. None of it is critical data.

Each group at each site has its own data store. For example, HR has its own, and finance has its own. All of these different groups at different locations use this data, and they use these filers to store it.

The Nasuni filers are on-site, and we have virtual edge appliances on ESX servers at about 35 sites globally. The data stored at these sites is then fed up into Azure and we have all of our data stored there.

The OR and DR capabilities have been a very big help for us. Previously, with the solutions we had, it would have taken weeks sometimes to get things fixed and back up and running for people. Now, it only takes a matter of minutes.

It used to be a lot of trouble to bring data back up and a lot of the time, it was read-only, so the people couldn't use it very well. Now, with Nasuni, we're able to pretty much keep their experience seamless, no matter how much trouble the hardware is in at the site.

The Nasuni filers are easy to manage, although the process is similar to what we had before. We have a report that comes out three times a day that gives us the amount of data that's in the queue to be uploaded to Azure on each individual filer. We keep track of that to make sure nothing is getting out of hand. It also tells us if the filer has been restarted and how long ago that happened. It gives us a quick view of everything and how much total we're using within Nasuni. This report is something we created on our own to keep track of things.

If a user deletes a file or a file becomes corrupted, it's easy for them to get it restored. There is very little chance that the data is going to be done. We've had a few people delete things, or they have become corrupted, and we were able to get that file back to them in the states that it was in about five minutes before they had a problem. We were able to do this without any issues. Overall, the continuous file versioning is really helpful.

The biggest and most impressive thing for us is the operational recovery (OR) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities that Nasuni has. If a filer goes down, or an ESX server goes down, then we can quickly recover. For example, we lost a controller the other day and all of the drives were corrupted. We were able to quickly repoint all of the users to a backup filer that we have at our data center, they were back up and running within minutes, and they still have read-write capabilities. Once that ESX server was fixed, we were able to repoint everything back to it in a matter of minutes. People were then again using their local filer to connect.

Nasuni provides continuous file versioning and we take snapshots on a regular basis. Right now, we have them stored forever, but we're trying to reign that in a little bit and keep them only for a period of time. Certainly, at this point, we have a lot of file versions.

We have not had a problem with ransomware but if we did, we would be able to restore the data pretty quickly by going back to an older version of the file before the ransomware took over. It is a similar process to the DR, although a little bit different. For us, OR and DR are pretty much the same thing. We haven't had any disasters that we've had to recover from but we've had three or four hardware failures a year that we've had to deal with. The continuous file versioning has helped to fix these problems pretty quickly.

Continuous file versioning also makes it easier for our operations group. The support team is able to restore files quickly, 24/7, and it is less work for them. They have more time to focus on other problems. The end-user also has access to shadow copies through Windows, and they've used that extensively at the sites.

Nasuni has helped to eliminate our on-premises infrastructure. When we moved to Nasuni, we moved to Azure. Before that, we had a large SAN storage that we were using, and we were able to get rid of it. That was a big difference for us.

We were definitely able to save some money because we've eliminated those expensive SAN disks completely. There were some servers at our old data center that we were able to get rid of, as well. There are some new expenses with Azure because we have to pay for the space taken by the snapshots, which is why we're going to put a retention limit in place. Overall, I don't have an exact number but we were able to save money.

Nasuni is transparent to our end-users. We have it all set up as a file server through Microsoft DFS. If you were to ask one of our end-users how they like Nasuni, they would have no idea what you're talking about.

One issue that we have is related to copying data out of Nasuni. We just sold a site and it was split into two pieces. One part of it was sold to another company and we kept the other part. At the site, they have a Nasuni filer with about eight terabytes of data. Now, we have to split that data and the problem stems from the fact that the other company doesn't have Nasuni.

This means that we have to copy all of that data back to the site and into a format that they can use, which is probably just a Windows file server, and then we have to split it somehow. I'm not really sure that there's an easy way to do that. It's going to take us a little bit longer to separate this other location, and we're having to invent things as we go along.  

In these areas, it's not as simple as it could be, but it doesn't happen very often. As such, we haven't had to worry about it too often. Although it's not affecting us too much at this point, if there's a problem such that we have trouble getting data out of Nasuni, then that could be an issue. However, for the time being, it seems fine.

When we have to rebuild a filer or put a new one at a site, one of the things that I would like to be able to do is just repoint the data from Azure to it. As it is now, you need to copy it using a method like Robocopy. To me, this seems counterintuitive or like we're going backward a little bit. I would like to see a way to be able to switch them around without any problem. That said, I'm not sure if it would then cause other issues because of how Nasuni works, so it may not be possible.

We started using Nasuni in 2018 and it's been running ever since.

Up until about a week ago, the stability has been rock solid. We've actually had a few issues after upgrading to version 9.3 that we're trying to deal with. We have a couple of sites that we're still not sure if Nasuni is the problem, or if it's VMware ESX, and we're working on that. At this point, we're not thinking about rolling back because of all of our sites, only two of them have problems. As such, we think that something else may be going on.

For the most part, it's been extremely stable, with no issues whatsoever. With Nasuni, there has been very little downtime, if any. Most of the sites have never gone down and with the sites that have, there's usually some other external problem.

Overall, it's been very stable for us.

We are limited to the amount of space that we have purchased from Nasuni. If we get close to running out then we just buy more. We still have to pay for the storage within Azure, so we're trying to make sure that it doesn't get out of control. In general, we don't need to add any on demand.

Scalability is not a problem and we can add as many servers and as many filers as we need to, which is really nice. For example, instead of buying tape drives and using that type of backup system, we decided to take a few sites where we have some smaller servers and we use Nasuni to back them up. We use a separate filer to back up all of that data. It's been nice in that way, where we've been able to do things with it that we hadn't originally thought of.

If it should happen that we make a large acquisition, and we bought 10 sites, we could easily put in 10 more filers. It wouldn't be a problem.

Amongst our 35 sites, we have between 10,000 and 12,000 users. A lot of them are office-type people such as those from HR and finance. All of us, including administrators and developers, use it for this kind of thing. The developers wouldn't store code on these because that's not what it's used for. Our Nasuni environment is specifically for data to help the business run, which isn't critical to producing goods or shipping them or anything like that. That is a completely different system. Anybody who works for the company that needs to access simple office data is going to be going through Nasuni.

We have approximately 210 terabytes stored in Nasuni right now. That continues to grow at perhaps a terabyte or two per month. I don't think we'll be moving it anywhere else at this point. Down the road, we do have a very large file system at our data center that we're considering moving, but it's going to take a lot of time to do that one because it's 400 terabytes and it's a lot of old data that we have to clean up first. But that's pretty much the only area that I would see us doing something.

Later this year, we're going to start refreshing some of the hardware because we're approaching five years on some of the older stuff. As we replace it, we'll do another rollout, but it's not going to be like before. We're just going to put a new server in and put a new filer and connect to the data.

Up until recently, I would have rated the technical support a seven out of ten. We had to open a case in Australia for a problem with one of the Nasuni filers, and I haven't got a response for it yet. We had one of the support people answer a question at about three in the morning, US East Coast time, and he said something to the effect that he would send an email giving an update. After that, we didn't hear back from him until about 25 hours later, which was a little concerning for me.

Part of the problem seems to be that Nasuni currently is not set up to do 24/7 support. They said that they were going to do that, so that was a little disappointing. Typically when we call in a problem, they jump all over it and they get it fixed in no time.

From the perspective of our end-users, the servers function the same way when they're working. We had Windows filers before and now they're Nasuni, so it's basically the same thing to them.

Although we mostly used Microsoft, we did use a backup solution called Double-Take, which is now owned by Carbonite. It did the job but it had a lot of idiosyncrasies that were very difficult to deal with at times. That was the only non-Microsoft thing that we used for the data before Nasuni, and we have since stopped using it.

In the beginning, the setup was kind of complex. We did have help from Nasuni, which was great. They were with us the whole time. We had some growing pains at the beginning, but once we figured out the first three or four sites, we were able to get everything done very quickly and efficiently, with very few problems moving to Nasuni.

When we first started with Nasuni, we had never used it before, and we had never used anything like that. We were used to using Windows servers, and there was a learning curve there to figure out the best way to set up the Nasuni filers. We really had to rely a lot on Nasuni for that. Some of it was trial and error, seeing what worked best as we started rolling it out.

We were replacing a single server that was responsible for doing everything. It was a file server, a domain controller, a print server, and an SCCM distribution point. It was all of these different things and we replaced that with one ESX server, which had multiple guest servers on it, doing all those functions separately. It is much better security-wise and much better operationally.

We started with a very slow implementation. We implemented one site, and then we waited two months before moving to the second site. We tried to start with some of the smaller sites first, with the least amount of data, to get our feet wet. Also, the first site we did was the one that I sit at. The team was all there and it was our site, so we figured we should do our site first. We staggered deployment, so it was not very quick. Then, once we had three or four completed, we did three a week for three months and we were done.

After completing the first site, choosing the next sites had to do with the hardware. We had some old hardware that we repurposed, so we did those sites next. After that, we moved to the sites that necessitated purchasing new hardware. 

From beginning to end, our implementation took a little more than a year. It began in August of 2018 and finished at the end of Q3 in 2019. The time it took was not because of Nasuni. Rather, it revolved around different ordering cycles in our company. Buying the new hardware was what stretched out the deployment time.

I was in charge of the team that did the implementation.

For purchasing and the initial negotiations with Nasuni, we used CDW. We still interact with them when it's time to do renewals, and they are great to deal with. They really help out quite a bit. They were the ones that brought us Nasuni in the first place and suggested that we take a look at it.

We're very happy with CDW. We use them for all of our hardware orders, and a couple of different infrastructure tools. We use them quite extensively.

We had four people responsible for the deployments, with one guy who was in charge of the group as the lead architect. Once it was deployed, we turned it over to our operations group, which is outsourced to TCS. Although they have supported us since then, they come to us if there's anything that's still an issue. We have a couple of guys that still work with Nasuni a little bit, but that's basically how the maintenance is done.

For the most part, there is little maintenance to do. There are situations such as when a controller card goes down, or like the issues we have been having since the upgrade. Otherwise, it's very hands-off and you really don't have to do a lot.

We don't plan on calculating a return on investment with this solution. In the grand scheme of things, it's really not very much money for what we're doing. We spend more money on the hardware, for example.

Our agreement is set up such that we pay annually per terabyte, and we buy a chunk of it at a time. Then if we run out of space, we go back to them and buy another chunk.

We thought about an agreement with a three-year plan, where we would get a small increase every year, but we decided not to take that approach at this time. We go through CDW for these agreements and they help us get all of the quotes together.

In addition to what we pay Nasuni, there is the cost of storage in Azure or whatever cloud service you're using. It can get pretty pricey if you have a lot of snapshots, which is something we've found and we're now trying to scale back on. That's the biggest thing that is extra and you may not think of right at the beginning.

We looked at a few different products that year, and we decided that Nasuni was the best way to go. It has really worked well for us.

One of the products that we looked at was Veeam, the backup software, but it would have been used a little bit differently. We also looked at Backup Exec and a tool from Microsoft. We didn't look at anything that was exactly like Nasuni. We looked at these other things that would create backups of the primary data, which would have stayed at the site. Nasuni was a completely different way of looking at it.

The difference with Nasuni is that rather than having a backup in the cloud, the primary copy of the data is what's in the cloud. For us, it's stored in Azure, whereas with the other tools, the primary copy stays at the site. If you had a major problem, for instance, this issue with the controller card, the problem with these other solutions or the way it was before was that you're down and out at least until you can get the controller card replaced.

Then, once you're back up, you're going to have to copy all of the data back. For that, it would probably need at least a week. Some of these sites have very poor connections. For example, we have a site that's in the Amazon jungle in Brazil and they are notorious for being very slow, yet we've used Nasuni there and it works fine. Some of these other solutions probably wouldn't have worked. In fact, we probably would have had to buy a tape drive and back up the servers that way.

We have a hosted data center where we don't pay for individual items, such as servers. Instead, we pay for a service. The service might include a server or storage, and Nasuni has not eliminated that because we still need our physical servers at the locations. We debated on whether or not to put the filer in Azure for each site, but we decided that it was better to have something local at this point.

For our company, we were a little ahead of the curve. We didn't have internet connections directly from each site, and they all routed through a central internet connection. Because of that, it was difficult to eliminate any hardware at the site. We needed something there physically. But, having the virtual appliance for Nasuni really helps out quite a bit, because then we only have to have one piece of hardware and we can put all of the other servers that we need for infrastructure on the same ESX server. We have five or six different servers that are doing different functions that at one point, would maybe have been three or four different physical servers. Now we've reduced it to one.

We use Microsoft SCOM as a monitoring tool to keep track of all of the filers and make sure that they are running. 

We don't use the Nasuni dashboard because we don't have to. Everything is working the way it is. We do have a management console set up and we do go into that occasionally, but it's not something that's a regular thing that our support people use.

If I had a colleague at another company with concerns about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would talk about the fact that the OR capabilities are so different than anything else that I've seen. The performance has actually not been too bad. You would think that there would be an issue with the cloud stores, but we set up a local cache on each filer that allows it to store up to a terabyte or two of regularly used data. That gets probably 80% of what people use, which means that they're accessing a local copy that's synced with what's in the cloud. This means that they don't really have to go to the cloud to get a lot of it. But when they do, it's pretty quick. It may not be as fast as if it were a local copy, but it's not too bad.

My advice for anybody who is considering Nasuni is that they definitely want to look at all of the options, but that Nasuni does have the best setup at this point. It offers the ability to recover things and provides data security. Especially with ransomware and all of these other new things that are causing lots of problems out there, it really helps mitigate some of that.

The biggest thing that I have learned from using Nasuni is that you shouldn't be afraid of the cloud.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.