Nasuni Reviews

We are a global media company and I look after eight Nasuni Filers for the UK and Ireland.

In the UK, every Nasuni appliance is stored locally in an office. They are stored in a standard comms room, and if that office went down for any reason, there are snapshots of the data made every hour that could be accessed.

A web version of the data can be available if there was a need due to an outage in a local office, so we can keep the business working.

With the mix of working from home and office, this is a good cloud solution for our company and we plan to use it as our standard file sharing platform going forward.

Our business is essentially split into two parts. We have a media element where they use standard office files such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Then, we have the creative division where they store things like high-end videos and Adobe files.

In the creative division, their file sizes are much bigger so we've seen the flexibility with having the on-premises device. For example, you can have a large caching device. Especially for our creative users, who are working on large creative files, they need that local speed access. They need something better than a standard USB drive, as well as something that can be backed up and is secure.

In general, it allows users in the business to access the data they need in a reliable fashion.

Nasuni has allowed us to replace multiple data silos and we are working toward having a single global file system. We shuttered one of our traditional on-premises data centers about 18 months ago, so we have this plan in the pipeline for the business. We know that Nasuni is our way to manage data effectively, where we can have cloud backups as well as the speed of a local appliance. Given how well it is working in our offices, they are now adopting it in other parts of the business, globally. The main drive for large data storage is going to be for Nasuni, going forward.

The need to have access to data 24 hours a day is very important for our business. We have teams and they sometimes work overnight or over a weekend. They may need to share data with colleagues in a different country or timezone, and that always-available service is quite important.

We do snapshots of our environment every hour, so if someone deletes a file and they're working on something with a deadline, we can revert back to something in a very recent version, in a short period of time. That element of the service has worked really well for us.

Nasuni has different sizes of appliances with different capacities that provide storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand. They take up very little room in our comms room rack. The biggest one that we have at the moment is 2U or 4U, so depending on the size of our office space and the amount of data storage, the range of different appliances that Nasuni has available gives us good options so we can pick and choose the most suitable solution for each office we have.

This is important to us because of the nature of our business. We regularly acquire companies, and normally, their data structure is not in line with our standards. Using Nasuni, we are able to take what they have and standardize it with a range of different hardware to fit our data storage platform.

For example, two of the units that we installed were for companies that we recently bought, and having them made the transition a lot easier than we thought it might be at first.

One of the ways that Nasuni has improved our organization is by providing access to centralized data. For example, we have a range of applications that have their own data repository. One of our teams that does a lot of data analytics needed access to our media-borne information. The need to expand that across other countries became apparent, probably about a year ago.

Some of our offices in Eastern Europe didn't have any storage capacity themselves, so we found giving them access to these file shares, just by giving them a web solution with access to this data, really helped them with the business of reaching the colleagues they needed to. It allows them to work in a seamless fashion, where they haven't been able to before. This has now expanded because it worked well for the needs they had.

Nasuni has simplified management compared to our previous processes. This is the product on the data storage side that really helped us cross the mix of hybrid cloud and on-premises devices. In the past, we had traditional servers in comms rooms and offices, or data centers and tape backups, so allowing us to have that on-site storage but with a cloud backup, and once it's configured, having to spend minimal time worrying about backups and how they worked, allowed us to cross that barrier to make our business more agile and help us simplify the support we provide.

In terms of continuous versioning, we have configured a hundred file versions, which is more than enough for our capacity. We also have hourly snapshots, which give us the ability to recover files quickly and easily. This is something that really assists us. That feature is used every week I imagine, certainly from our offices. The fact that they're an always-available and always-on service really helps us keep up with our business.

When we identify a security incident, we know a time we can go back to, where the data we have is clean. We're confident that we can do that. We have test servers so that if there's a need to restore separate environments, to check that data is uninfected, we have that option available. We have the ability to look at the file timestamps at a quick glance, and the fact that we are confident Nasuni will provide what we need is very important for our operations.

Continuous file versioning has a positive impact on our users. When they accidentally delete a file, all they have to do is tell us a file name and when they last had it, and we can find a version of that file within an hour of having that request. The nature of our business is that people want things immediately. Using Nasuni, we can service that request without having to restore from a tape backup. With the right access, it's very quick to identify. Even if a file was corrupt from a month ago, we can keep going back to other versions. Because we maintain other copies of the data, we can go back to one version that we know works, from the most recent edition of it.

One of the good features with file versioning in Nasuni is they'll only backup changes during the hourly snapshot, so even if someone had uploaded a lot of video content, for example, onto the network, and the last backup was half an hour ago, it'll only backup the changes to those files. With the bandwidth limits we've put in place, we know it's not going to impact the live data by doing the backup. That's an important feature because we're using the little and often approach. We're constantly backing up changes and it allows us to keep on top of the data we back up, and have very recent versions of it.

Nasuni has helped us to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We have known for perhaps three years that we were going to be phasing out our data centers. It was at this time when we started getting recommendations for Nasuni. Ultimately, it has helped to drive down the costs. Considering the whole backend infrastructure of what we would need in a data center to support devices like this, the costs have been much reduced and we've had no reduction in terms of reliability, which is the key thing. We've had an improved level of service with reduced costs, which is obviously a very big plus.

This product helps to simplify infrastructure purchasing and support requirements. We had looked up what sort of type of network you need and whether we needed to have a certain speed. We have Nasuni appliances in offices with a 50 meg internet connection, and then we've got them in offices with a 10 gig internet connection, so it shows you don't need to spend big money on your network infrastructure.

One of the good features of Nasuni is that it allows you to make the changes you need to, depending on your environment. We've got a range of offices of different sizes and internet speeds but we can still provide the same level of service.

In some of the smaller sites that we have in the UK, we had to increase the internet speeds. This happened because people had data stored in other places and said, "All right, we want to put this into Nasuni as well." This meant that there were some small increments of the internet circuits we needed, but we found that it was still far outweighed by the overall cost saving we've made with data centers, and for hiring network infrastructure that we've had to purchase in the past.

Nasuni has helped to decrease capital costs because we haven't had to buy as much excess capacity. When we've had the need to order an appliance, we've tried to do a bit of forecasting on current data sizes and how that might grow over time. One of the good things with Nasuni is that we've got it set so that if data isn't accessed over six to twelve months, it is archived. It can still be retrieved if necessary, but without it being stored on the main device, you can keep it the same size. Your data size can go up but it's because it only presents the most recently used data. That really helps us, not having to order new physical devices every couple of years. 

The Nasuni filers are easy to use. 

The Nasuni management dashboard is helpful because, on the administration side, I'm able to view all of the different filers that we have in the UK, rather than check each one of them individually.

We can configure alerts, which is a useful feature. We have a remote service support team and we've only handed over support to them in the last six months. Prior to that, a lot of support was the responsibility of the local IT teams that I managed. I was able to keep in touch with my colleagues in each local office to see if they needed updates supplied, or if they had issues with their devices. I was able to see all of this on one page, which was very useful because I could then drill into the details, as and when I needed to.

Nasuni provides options to limit the bandwidth of your live data as well as your backups, so you can perform backups after hours if needed.

When we first set up our bandwidth limiting, we had a few problems when it came to managing it. This is something that could be made easier; however, we were able to make the changes that we needed to for our environment.

I have been using Nasuni for approximately three years.

Nasuni is a stable product. Our users have really noticed the difference, just in having a web-based backup and the file shares available with the on-site appliance, 24/7.

We have found that people weren't needing to come into the office as much to work, even during pre-pandemic times. People really noticed the difference in terms of how much more flexible it made their teams, especially if they weren't all physically located in one office or country. It meant that they could still work on data and review different versions of files.

Especially with the business that I work in, if they're preparing pitch documents, they'll sometimes want to look at other versions of files, perhaps five versions earlier, just to compare. With Nasuni, they have that option readily available, and that took the pressure off my teams to support them because the features were there for them to use.

Across the UK, we have approximately 15 local IT support staff. We also have a backend network team, so if there are server issues or network outages, we can escalate to another team of five. However, on the administration side, day-to-day, it is very low because once the system is set up and stable, we don't encounter very many issues with it.

In summary, we have the trust that it delivers the stability we need for our products.

The scalability is really good. The fact you can increase your data, and the way it only presents the active data, is very helpful. Initially, for some of our brands, we thought that we needed to have a large amount of data available over time. Then, with some analysis on Nasuni, we realized pretty quickly they only needed a small portion of that available but we were able to present the data to them, without them realizing not all of it was actively available. These changes were invisible to our users that access the shares so it allowed us to present in a way it was more cost-effective, and allowed us to be more scalable if they were accessing lots of data regularly. We have the capacity to do that without changing hardware.

Currently, we have eight on-premises devices across our offices in the UK. In these offices, we have file shares for approximately 4,000 users and the bulk of them are standard-level access. We are currently expanding our use of this solution across our American offices.

Most of our business users have access to at least one or two of our Nasuni file shares. We find them being used regularly until late weeknights and weekends. As it allows people in the business to work in any capacity they need, it's used extensively. We see hundreds of users connected to file shares every day.

Now that we're coming out of lockdown, the usage of offices and people in the business is slowly rising. That said, everyone has access to some of the shares, and there are some teams that have smaller data sets that we're looking to migrate in, anywhere we don't have the data already stored in Nasuni. As the capacity of our business grows, and once we're aware of the data that is being used, we generally make plans to get it stored. As such, I expect usage to continue to increase. It makes sense because we have that single, secure platform for it.

In the UK, there are a few different teams, especially within our creative brands. They may have a high level of access where they can create and administer folders, but Nasuni allows us to manage the non-standard requests as and when they're needed. For the volume of users we have for accessing that data, we see very few issues that present themselves.

In the UK, we started with on-premises filers. We had identified the offices where we needed to have replacements for our existing mix of on-premises file servers.

Scalability options for Nasuni include the ability to host data purely in the cloud, so some of the offices outside of the UK are now looking at that option. If they don't have the need or resources to fund an on-premises appliance, there is a big appeal to this approach because they can choose the way the data is available to users in the business.

Nasuni makes it easy to configure organizational changes. Something that we're looking at now is a cloud version of a Nasuni server. We found there are templates that allow you to build a server from scratch, so that definitely makes the cloud hosting element of Nasuni a lot easier to configure. You don't need to know all of the technical aspects of building a server from traditional Windows or a Linux operating system. You can replicate current service setups to a new one as well, so the tools have improved and got better over time. The support that we have with Nasuni gives us good options, so if our needs change, we feel like Nasuni is able to cope with those changes.

The scalability of these devices is the part that really did appeal to us and continues to do so. The whole ability to scale up data sizes but keep the same hardware for three years, if there are no hardware issues in that time, allows us to manage our data without having to make big investments on either hardware or supporting infrastructure. That has really helped us prove to our other offices around the business that it's a worthwhile investment to go with Nasuni.

We have been in contact with technical support a few times.

Certainly, at the start when we were doing the initial rollout, we had contact with them. Also, we did have a hardware issue on a server last year, so we had to involve support on that occasion. There were some internal parts that had to be replaced in some of the Nasuni servers last year, as well, so we had to wait for parts to be delivered. With the support and guidance of tech support, we were able to replace those after hours.

Overall, our experience with support, starting with logging tickets using the portal, is that they were quite responsive and helpful. I would rate them an eight out of ten. Not only were the replies quick but I think that the main Nasuni support is based in the US, and they made sure that someone was available UK time. Generally, we do stuff outside of business hours in the UK, and we found the support was there when we needed it at the right time, and that was very important because we were able to rely on it.

Prior to Nasuni, we had a mix of standard Windows file shares and different products. It was not a single product. Rather, it was various pieces of equipment that we had inherited. This is why we found it a lot more challenging to manage the data we had.

We switched because of the need to have a single platform. We needed something that we could rely on because we were spending more and more time on basic administration because the file shares were on different platforms, which meant that we had to grant different people access to multiple platforms. It was a lot more open to problems.

With our business, the drive was to a Cloud-First strategy and using Nasuni allowed us to meet that goal and to simplify the support we provide.

Because our data wasn't in a great state to start with, it probably took more time for planning than it should have. That was more fault on our side but what we saw fairly quickly, in terms of what Nasuni can do, helped us clear the picture of what we wanted to do or what we could do. We started with something reasonably complex but when we got Nasuni up and running, it had simplified the process for us.

With one physical device, you could have multiple volumes. When we merged multiple companies in the past, some of them had their own individual servers. We realized that you could have separate virtual servers or separate volumes within a single physical appliance, but you could still keep your data separated securely with the right permissions. That was another reason Nasuni appealed to us. It gave us more options to be flexible, and to an end-user, their file shares were on a shared physical device but they were still separated in terms of security.

In our first phase of the implementation, where we ordered five of the devices, it took seven or eight weeks to prepare the network information, order the units, and get the first one installed. It was probably another two months on top of that before we had the last of the five devices installed, so the deployment took between four and five months in total.

Our implementation strategy included trying to merge as many data sets into Nasuni as we could. It was not just all data and file servers. People, especially within our creative teams, had hard drives with lots of data that wasn't backed up. One of our goals was to simplify support and storage and make it secure, having it all backed up. As the deployment was rolled out, we improved things in these aspects.

When updates come out, we normally wait a few weeks to do the latest upgrades. For the most part, we keep them up to date.

It was myself and a couple of my colleagues who deployed the devices. We looked at the data for different offices around the UK and we collated data sizes and specifications. Between us, we looked at the size of appliances we needed in each site and then worked with Nasuni to implement and set those up.

We had assistance from a third party called Nephos Technologies, which is a professional services outlet that was recommended. We discussed plans that we had for them and then we provided them with data. They gave us some recommendations for each of the offices that we wanted to set up. Their assistance really helped us in the process.

I would rate Nephos and eight and a half out of ten. We found that they were flexible, understood our current challenges, and what we wanted to do. Like any project, timelines had to change. For example, we had to change the order of servers that we installed. Although the plan did change between when we started and when we finished, the support we got helped us to accommodate those changes.

Our ROI is in terms of the time that we have saved when it comes to supporting our users. When you consider the cost of the product and compare it to running the service, you find that the cost is flat when you have to increase your usage and data. This is something that was very appealing. 

We're looking at a global agreement on the licensing from Nasuni now, as we're expanding to other markets. We ordered five or six units to start, which helped with our pricing model.

When we first implemented Nasuni, we gave them an estimate of how many terabytes of storage we wanted to support, which helped to define the types of appliances we needed. We conduct annual reviews to see whether we're meeting our current and future needs, and as a result, we have increased our storage capacity. We've generally kept the same models of appliances, just because of the way Nusani stores the data.

The cost is based on the capacity, which is approximately $100 USD per terabyte.

In our case, we pay for both hardware support and software support. The software support is for the amount of data that we have and the hardware support is for the actual appliances that we have in our offices.

We incurred some additional costs when we asked for help from professional services. These were for offices in other countries that needed assistance with getting their devices installed.

When we were first looking into Nasuni, it was because of recommendations that we'd received and information that we had read online. There were other products, but Nasuni worked well for what we wanted to do at the time. All we needed was a good network connection and a secure room to store the Nasuni device, and we're able to manage that device remotely or on-site, as and when we need to.

There were some other Cloud platforms in use within smaller parts of our business at the time, so we reviewed those, spoke to some of the staff in the business and other IT teams for their input, and compared them against what Nasuni could offer. Through a process of elimination and pricing features, we realized Nasuni was looking like our best option, so it was the one we chose with all those factors in mind.

We use traditional file shares like Windows, Mac, and SMB files shares. As such, we haven't needed to take advantage of the storage for hosting VDI environments.

The switch from an on-premises device to the web is something we will test more, probably towards the start of next year. We would like to be able to have an office have a smaller on-site appliance with more data in the cloud. We will want to determine things like whether it needs a faster internet connection if you only have a web version of your data. Some of our other offices outside the UK will be testing that more than we currently do at the moment.

If a colleague of mine at another company was concerned about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would say that based on the experience that I've had to this point, I definitely recommend it. I can recommend Nasuni just for reliability and scalability, as it definitely ticks those two boxes. I can't say anything other than good things about it.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Nasuni is to start by looking at where you're going to host your data. Do you want cloud-based storage, on-premises, or a hybrid of both? It has a range of options for different needs, which is one of the things that makes it a great product. It meets our need for standard and large individual file storage, and it is invisible to someone that uses it.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is related to scalability. We have been able to meet the very different needs of our business. We have a wide range of users and departments that want different things presented to them, and Nasuni allows you to present that on the backend in one way to people of different needs, so that it can fit whatever's needed for the business.

As I've progressed within my role in the IT support teams, it has increased my need to know more about the product and see how it affects our staff and the business.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have two offices and each one has a local appliance that we use as file servers. They both replicate to each other, and we have a third appliance in Azure for DR. If a file server goes down in one office, we can use the other one. And if both go down, we can use the one in Azure.

It's a hybrid. So we have two appliances and one cloud-based appliance.

Nasuni has replaced massive SANs that were expensive, slow, and kept all the data. With the SANs, backup and recovery was very slow. With Nasuni, the simplicity of management is light-years ahead of our previous processes because the old backup and recovery was so slow, and we had to keep growing the SAN as the business grew. Now, we're leveraging the cloud as our storage, and the local appliances mean fast performance for the users.

Eliminating the on-premises infrastructure has reduced our costs by a good 50 percent. We have also had decreased capital costs because the cost of the appliances has gone down.

The solution also provides Continuous File Versioning. We do it every five minutes. There have been many times that people have called me and said they need a file at a specific point in time. We're able to provide that recovery, which is great. Before, maybe we were backing up once a day and, a week later, we wouldn't have the file versioning anymore with traditional SAN. In terms of restores, people delete things by accident all the time and having the ability to restore has been great.

And when it comes to our IT operations, it's made things easier and more streamlined. People have more confidence in the infrastructure. It's had a positive impact.

The most valuable feature is the storage in that it only keeps the last-used data locally, while everything else is backed up to the cloud. That way, we never really have to worry about file space in each office or the replication to the other file servers for DR.

It also provides a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. That's very important to us because we always know what the status is. It gives us views into it and also helps with auditing, tracing, and tracking of who's accessing things and who's doing what. And there is also the recovery from the cloud.

Nasuni also enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. The unlimited capacity is very important because with other solutions, as files grow, you're always having to add more storage. Here, the algorithm just caches what's being used and archives what's not, and if you need to get those archives, it's very simple to get them back.

The only thing that I'd like to see is more support for platforms like OneDrive or Box.com.

I have been using Nasuni for one year.

It's always available because we're utilizing Microsoft Azure. And on-premises, the hardware seems to be pretty stable.

The scalability is very good. If you want to add a new office, you can scale pretty quickly. You add a new appliance, add the volume, and it just works.

Right now our environment is about 10 terabytes. We expect a normal usage increase of about 10 percent per year. We have 150 daily users. They're across the company, including the business side, the back-office side. Everybody in the firm uses it.

I would rate their support at 10 out of 10. Anytime I have an issue, they answer very quickly.

It's super-easy to configure the solution. They were great to install, cut-over, and it's great to use. I worked with their implementation consultant. We set it up, we cut over the data, and it was all pretty simple and straightforward.

Our deployment took one month.

Our experience with their consultant during the deployment was great.

The pricing is on par with everybody else, and fair.

We looked at CTERA. The main differences between that and Nasuni are the usability features; the global file locking and caching. Nasuni is better.

As for business agility and cash flow compared to buying fixed assets, with Nasuni we still have their appliances so every three to five years we have to do a hardware refresh. We're not 100 percent in the cloud. But it's easy. It's very easy to buy a new appliance and cut over.

If a colleague at another company had concerns about migration to the cloud and about the solution's performance, I would say "Go ahead and do it. It will make your life a lot easier and the transition is not that difficult."

The ease of use is pretty good. It just works well for us. I'm pretty excited about it.

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.

We primarily use Nasuni as a file server. It is an enterprise cloud gateway.

Nasuni has helped to replace multiple data silos with a single global file system. Through digital transformation, Nasuni has helped us centralize and then normalize one solution for all, rather than having silos everywhere. This is important primarily when it comes to information security. This is my concern because I'm the global business information security officer for the company. Nasuni provides us and our clients with some assurance that we can secure the data properly, in addition to having resiliency.

This product provides a single platform with a 360-degree view of our data, which is important to us because, with all of the regulations introduced in the world, such as GDPR, we need visibility of the data. Nowadays, one of the most important things is having visibility of your data and being able to classify it properly. You need to be able to secure it. You also need to know exactly where it is because regulators and clients have the option to audit us if they decide. Without knowledge of where our data is, we can easily fall victim to a hacker or have issues with regulators. 

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits, although it's subject to licensing.

With the help of Nasuni, we have been able to reduce our on-premises infrastructure. This includes both virtual and physical infrastructure. We have been able to do so because it consolidates storage into one appliance, which is connected to the cloud.

The most valuable feature is that it provides single-point connectivity to our cloud storage and at the same time, it helps to keep our data secure.

Nasuni is fairly simple to manage and there haven't been many issues with it. In comparison to any other solutions that we are using, it was a big difference. It is significantly better than our previous solutions, in terms of providing a simple, high-level overview.

We use Nasuni's continuous file versioning feature and it fully protects us. With the ability to version files and have continuous recovery, it helps in terms of resiliency. If we have an incident then we would be able to easily recover from it by using the technology.

If a user accidentally deletes a file or one becomes corrupted, the continuous file versioning allows us to easily recover it. It has significantly improved our ability to recover files and in that space, it has helped us to improve our restorative IT operations. We have been able to take away legacy solutions and bring backups to the next level.

We would like to have a user desktop agent to help improve the end-user experience. They had a legacy agent but do not currently have the capability. This is something that we have been working with Nasuni on and are looking forward to.

We have been using Nasuni for between five and seven years.

We use it quite extensively, globally within the organization, and stability-wise, we have not had many problems. The earlier versions did present some issues but as new updates were released, it was improved and all of the issues were rectified. 

The solution is highly scalable.

The technology is easy to deploy. It's easy to scale in terms of connecting all of the Nasuni Cloud Gateways. It's self-explanatory.

Nasuni as a supplier is pretty responsive and provides us with all of the support we need. They have helped to resolve any issues that were occurring, pretty quickly.

There have been small shortcomings with support so it isn't perfect, although I don't think that any supplier I have dealt with has support that I would rate a ten out of ten. Ours involved the crossing of timezones.

Prior to this solution, between five and ten years ago, everyone was using physical appliances including physical servers. Everyone started shifting to the cloud and as we began to do the same, we found that Nasuni was the ideal solution.

We came up with a cloud-first strategy and started moving to the Cloud. With this, and because of our security and compliance requirements, it was the solution to implement at the time. This is why we chose it.

Implementing Nasuni was quite easy and it was not difficult to make the transition from our previous system. There were some challenges initially but they were resolved. We still work with Nasuni if there are any problems, but we don't have very many issues.

Overall, the implementation was quite straightforward and it was completed in a couple of months. Our strategy included migrating a lot of data to the cloud and it took a while because of the upload speeds.

The implementation was done in-house. We had the entire operations team involved. The executive technology people were involved as well, working with Nasuni. It was a sizable group of people involved in the implementation. 

We evaluated other options prior to implementing Nasuni. As the CSO, I can't speak to all of the reasons that we chose it. However, from a security point of view, it was the best solution at the time.

If one of my colleagues at another company had concerns about the migration to the cloud and the solution's performance then I would say that each solution has its own challenges. With Nasuni, it was quite smooth for us. There were some teething issues but that was at the beginning. When we first started with Nasuni, it was a very new product and we had some problems. At this stage, I am very confident that it wouldn't be a problem to migrate to the platform and use it.

In summary, this is a good product but there are still aspects that can be developed. An example is the desktop agent for users. Things can always be improved and made a little bit better.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Nasuni to replicate sensitive data from on-premise to the cloud.

We have a hybrid deployment. It is hosted by a company in the cloud, but it is not our company. 

It replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. It was important to have data in a central location where the information could be monitored, maintained, and audited. We needed a single point of reference for the data. We needed it in one central location to be able to replicate it to the cloud. Rather than having data spread out all over the place, we wanted it in one place so that everybody has one place to go and get it.

In terms of simplicity of management, previous processes had no management in place. However, Nasuni was very easy to set up and manage. Integrations with Active Directory made it even simpler. It is very easy to manage.

It is very easy to make changes to the system for organizational changes. It is easy to set up new shares, and it is easy to configure who has access to those shares. It is also easy to do some of the replications that are needed with the system. There are some things that are not easy to set up, but that's a specific use case for us. It is not necessarily what most people do.

We use Nasuni's Continuous File Versioning feature. If somebody accidentally deletes something, we have version history available for the file system. So, if somebody were to accidentally go out there and make a change to the wrong document, or go out there and actually delete the document, we have multiple versions of that file that we can recover from to restore it, which is good. So, there is some type of disaster recovery. 

We're saving manpower and man hours. People don't have to do so much individual-task work and side work. They can use this system. It is all connected to our network. It makes everything more efficient. Our workflows are more efficient. It saves our company probably six hours a week with all combined employees.

Its dependability and auditing capabilities are very important to us to be able to maintain a chain of custody of the information.

Its file-sharing capabilities via a web portal are huge to us.

Its interface design or the graphic user interface design can be slightly tweaked in some areas. Some built-in setup wizards would be very beneficial. Rather than having to go in and configure it by hand, there should be more setup wizards for onboarding new data shares and getting it set up the way you want. I don't know if these are on their roadmap, but I sat down and talked to them about some of the work concerns, some of the things that we liked, and some of the things that we didn't like. They are probably working on that.

I have been using this solution for about a year and a half.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability. In a year and a half, we've had one downtime. You can't give it a 100%, but it is 99.99999%. The way we've implemented it and have it running, it works. It is rarely down. Its uptime is wonderful.

We haven't really had to scale it, so that doesn't really apply to us, but I know the inherent operation of the system, and it is scalable to as big as you want it to go. Our environment is of a hundred terabytes. We have projected to increase its usage within the next five years.

Their support system is helpful and gets the job done, which is important to us. We haven't had to really use their support system because the system is just working the way it was designed, which is good for us.

Its initial setup was very complex. We are using Nasuni in a non-standard implementation. We are not using Nasuni the way it was designed to work out of the box. We decided to go with Nasuni because there was no solution on the market to do what we were trying to do. So, we worked and partnered with Nasuni to build a solution that fits our custom needs and the needs of many other companies, should they decide to go the same route.

Its deployment took two months. It was a pilot implementation. We had designed the system from the beginning and then implemented it. There was no real time frame or deadline. 

The Nasuni team was there for implementation. They were very knowledgeable of their product and of things that we needed answers to that were not their project. Their team that helped us implement was awesome. In particular, they had one guy with whom we worked. He just knew everything and was very smart when it came to software programming that was required on our side to implement the system. He was critical to the project's success. I called him a Wizard because he was very good with PowerShell commands. If we didn't have Nasuni's team working with us, it would have taken us a lot longer.

Their support during and after deployment was definitely a 10 star because they maintained contact with us. After we got everything deployed, they were available for answers and information to make sure everything was working. The system needed an update or something like that or had a couple of errors, and we reached out to them, and within 48 hours, they answered back on whether it was a concern or why it was happening. From the start to the fix, the whole thing took less than 48 hours. After we wrapped the project up and called it done, we haven't had to really use their support system because the system is just working the way it was designed.

We have slightly seen an ROI. We're not having to micromanage multiple data locations because it is all centrally located, so we don't have to buy that product anymore or that material anymore. For our use case, we had slight cost savings to hardware since implementing the system, but the amount of money that it is saving us time-wise is huge. That's the main reason we went with the solution. We can make everything more efficient.

I would not say it is economically priced, but it is affordable. If you can afford to pay for it, it is worth the money, but it is definitely not overpriced. It is priced about where it needs to be in the market. 

We were satisfied with the way they did their licensing and how they handled it. I believe they actually license by data size. It is based on how much data is being held on the machine and replicated, and that's completely understandable. So, for us, their pricing was as expected and affordable.

There are additional costs depending on how you set it up. If you want to host an on-premise solution, you've got to have the hardware to do that. If you deploy their solution in the cloud, you're going to pay more for it. If you host in your own personal cloud, there are costs associated with that.

I can't remember the name of the other company, but basically, we went to a test environment to try to set up the solution, but the company could not get it to do as we wanted it to do. So, we had to cancel the project with that company and find a different company.

To someone who has concerns about migration to the cloud and about Nasuni's performance in that area, I would say that there is no worry at all about using it. Nasuni's software does data replication. So, it takes the data that's on-premise and replicates it to another server or to the cloud. If you want an offsite backup and a stable solution that is affordable, you would have no worry whatsoever. This would be a highly recommended product to do that because that's what it is designed to do.

I would advise making sure that you've got everything planned out of what you want to move. Have a good project plan, and at the beginning, have all the data on the table of what you want to move to the cloud or what data you want to replicate from one point to another. As you set the system up, it is easy to go through and add more data entry points into that replication process, but it would be better to have that at the beginning and get it all set up from the beginning.

It can provide file storage capacity anywhere it is needed, on-demand and without limits, but we are not using Nasuni in that capacity. We have also not used Nasuni to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments.

It has not helped us in eliminating on-premises infrastructure. It has eased our concerns related to data recovery, but it has not affected our IT operation. We specifically put a certain type of data into the system that we knew that we could not lose, and we needed it replicated. The system has so far been doing an awesome job and working as advertised. We have things in place, and with other solution providers and whatnot, this one had to live in its own environment. Nasuni gave us its own environment where it could be replicated, but it has not affected our concerns about timely backups and restores or other areas of IT.

I'd have to give it a 10 out of 10 because we haven't had any issues, and the amount of technological experience and expertise that they brought to the table in our project was amazing. 

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. 

We have one physical filer on-premises and six virtual filers.

Our primary use case is as a NAS service, and we use it for all of our companywide drives. It contains home drives, department drives, file sharing, etc. All of our end-users put their data on these drives.

Nasuni offers us file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits. We have not had any issues on the filers where we run out of cache space rapidly. This is important to us, especially at our remote offices where we are running virtual to filers. It's nice to know that there is enough storage there for end-users to download or cache as many files as they want, without filling up the filer and data being removed from the cache.

This product gives us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. I can look at all of our data and I have the ability to recover all of our data from a single console. Navigating our data is fairly simplistic and as far as the end-users are involved, it's nice to know that they can share data across multiple filers.

Nasuni has not eliminated our need for on-premises infrastructure, but it has certainly reduced it. Our whole NAS environment is much simpler and easier as far as updating and upgrading OS versions of Nasuni. The main point is that the ease of use of the product is great.

The most valuable feature is that we have redundancy in our data. It's nice to know that it is cached both locally on the filters, as well as stored on that cloud.

We take snapshots every 15 minutes and it's nice to know that we have many versions of our data backed up.

Nasuni recently implemented a health system for filers. However, it needs better visibility because it lacks data and an explanation, or reasoning as to why a particular filer may be unhealthy. Similarly, when we receive an error on a snapshot, a little more detail as to what failed in the snapshot, and why, would be helpful. Essentially, on the learning side, there is some room for improvement.

We began using Nasuni in the spring of 2017, just over four years ago.

This solution is very stable. Knock on wood, I don't think we've ever had any particular issues with our physical filer or with the virtual filers, and we've never really had any failures with our data not being available.

With respect to scaling, it's very easy to increase or decrease as you like. We are a construction company and we do have a couple of Nasuni desktop-size filers that we have deployed to job sites a couple of times. When they are done with the job site, we've decommissioned the filers and implemented them at other job sites.

Overall, it's very easy to scale. We currently have seven filers and our license is set at 25 terabytes. This is something that I do see increasing because right now, we're at 23. When our license next renews, which may be in December, we may decide to increase it by five or ten terabytes. I don't foresee us increasing the number of filers, although that could always change.

I work with the support fairly often and for the most part, it's pretty good. I have had a couple of instances where the technicians were not very reliable as far as waiting for them to get back to me. However, I won't say that they weren't helpful.

Overall, rating from a one to ten, I'd give them an eight or nine. Some of the technicians could be more responsive, which is an area for improvement in this regard.

In our environment, Nasuni has helped to replace multiple servers with a single global file system. Our old environment consisted of between nine and twelve servers, and now we're down to seven. The number has not drastically decreased but it is a lot simpler to use.

Our previous environment was an HP LeftHand solution, and when I started with the company, I knew nothing about it. I was learning on the fly. It worked, but it was very difficult to update to the latest OS version. Or, if I had to implement new firmware or things like that, it was a lot more difficult.

The primary reason we switched from our previous NAS environment was that it was five or six years old. It was somewhat difficult to manage, especially when it came to updating the hardware and the software, et cetera. Nasuni just makes the whole process easier. Updating the actual virtual and physical server or filer is basically a one-click operation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I worked with a Nasuni technician on the initial setup and it was very clear when it came to moving our data from the existing NAS environment to the Nasuni environment.

The time it took for the actual setup of the filers was pretty short, but getting all of the data into the Nasuni environment took longer. That depended solely on our side, as we needed to work with all of our departments to get their data transferred over. In total, it probably took us between three and four months to complete. The bulk of this had nothing to do with Nasuni.

The strategy was simply to get off of our old NAS environment and get all of our department data moved over to Nasuni. At that point, we also had it stored in the cloud.

There are two of us who maintain the environment, although it is primarily me. I have a coworker that will help occasionally when it comes to updating the filers in the environment. However, it is mainly me who takes care of it.

My manager at the time was the one who selected Nasuni and I wasn't part of the group that was selecting new environments or new products at the time. That was in the initial stages of my employment at the company.

That said, I don't remember us looking at a lot of other vendors when we were seeking to replace our NAS environment.

We are currently running Nasuni version 9.0.7 and are waiting to upgrade to version 9.3.3. It's available, we just have not upgraded yet.

If I had a colleague in another company who had concerns about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance in that area, I would tell them that the migration from our NAS environment to Nasuni was quite simple. I used Robocopy to copy our data from the existing environment to Nasuni and it worked well. It was just a matter of copying the data to our physical filer and then it would automatically take snapshots and send them to the cloud. For me, overall, it was quite simple.

When we first started, they had a different migration tool and I don't think it worked as well as we wanted it to. They may now have a new tool that works better than Robocopy.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it works great. It does what we need it to do and the process of administering it is very simple through the Nasuni Management Console. I would recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We need a traditional file server-type solution while reducing all of the complexities around the management of it.

Using Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere and on-demand, without limits, which is important to us because we're quite a distributed company and we have lots of different remote locations. We don't have enough storage to have a server on each site, so it's really beneficial that we have easily accessible, centralized storage. The bottom line is that it's easy for us to support lots of different remote users in one simple solution.

Nasuni gives us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our data, which is important so that we know the size of our estate and the amount of data that we hold. As a construction company, we have to retain data for 10 years, or sometimes more. This means that having a central platform that can control our data and ensure that it is intact, is extremely valuable for the way we do business.

Although we are using Nasuni in a cloud environment, it has not really affected the costs of our on-premises infrastructure. This is because we were relatively ahead of the curve, so our previous file solution was already in the cloud. However, it was just more complicated with multiple servers. They were Windows Servers that had to be managed by us. These have been reduced into two single devices but there is no change in terms of on-premises hardware.

The most valuable feature is the simplicity of the backup and restore functions.

The performance is good for everything from the backups to the file copies, to the mobility.

We use the continuous versioning feature and although we have not had to recover from a disaster, it has given us the confidence that if something like a ransomware incident should occur, we have the ability to restore to a previous safe version. We are also confident that we would have the technical solution and support to ensure that we do not have a bad experience or a negative impact on our business.

One thing to consider is that Nasuni will have the same limitations that a traditional file storage solution will have, although that is because they are taking the place of a traditional architectural model. For example, Office 365 supports collaboration on documents such as Excel files and Word documents, but because Nasuni is a traditional file server, in that sense, it can't make use of that functionality.

I have been working with Nasuni for just over one year.

We have had no problems in terms of stability or availability.

The limitations to accessing file data in our environment are related to our networking, and it's not something that can necessarily be overcome when we have sites that are on 3G or 4G connections, that do not warrant having on-premises hardware. When those networks go down, that's where we will face limitations, but we've never had any limitations with regards to Nasuni itself. 

With respect to being able to support organizational changes, it is very quick to expand and support new parts of our business. The infrastructure is already there and it's scalable. This means that creating new business units and storage for those business units is really quite simple, especially once you've documented the very few basic steps that you need to take to create a new file storage unit.

Being a construction company, I'm always told that our two biggest technical requirements are print and file. File is one of the biggest and most important technologies without our business and in that capacity, Nasuni is being used every day by everyone throughout the business.

At this point, we are fully using it for all of our data storage and as our data requirements grow, the data we input into Nasuni will grow.

In general, they have done a very good job of architecting the product, designing for scalability, and educating customers on how you can scale. To this end, I can't foresee any way that they could improve what they currently do.

My experience with support was very positive. I had 24/7 support and there were moments when I had to contact them out of hours. The only negative experience when contacting out of hours was that they had a call handler, who wasn't able to put you straight through to a technical person. You had to wait for a call back before you can get support.

Overall, I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Prior to Nasuni, we had a traditional file server set up, and it included multiple servers. With Nasuni, it brings it all together into one solution. This consolidation helped to reduce and move some of the management overhead.

Compared to what we did before implementing Nasuni, it reduces the vast majority of management. With our traditional server, we had to do updates, including Windows updates, hardware repairs, and regular maintenance. We had to be concerned about running out of storage space and thus had to plan ahead to increase or replace hard drives or storage. We would also have to factor in other things such as an operating system upgrade, from Windows 2016 to Windows 2019. With Nasuni, we don't have to consider any of those management overheads. It's all self-contained in the way it's run and managed.

If our previous solution was managed well, backups and restores can be relatively smooth and simple, although that involves a fair amount of management. With Nasuni having such a powerful backup and restore functionality, we find all of the positives of an advanced backup and restore solution, but with very few of the management overhead negatives.

Continuous versioning helps to provide a good experience for our users in cases where they lose files or something becomes corrupted. Lots of users don't want or don't need to understand the technicalities behind the scenes. All they know is that if something gets deleted or just disappears, they want it returned. The value for us is really felt by IT in this case, when we can return those files to users confidently and quickly. That's where the real value comes in for us.

The initial setup was very simple. We had lots of support directly from Nasuni.

Our deployment took approximately a month and a half to complete. The process began with building the infrastructure and then implementing it in the IT department. From there, our strategy was to start with the smaller departments and ramp up to the bigger departments with larger existing data storage requirements.

Our in-house team was responsible for the implementation.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment. The old file infrastructure took lots of human intervention to maintain and expand and repair. One way that we've experienced a return on investment is that we haven't needed to hire additional staff. Furthermore, the current staff has been able to focus on different areas of the business.

I was not involved in the product investigation stage and am not aware of what other products were evaluated.

Nasuni appears to be constantly releasing new features or new functionality which, although at this point we don't use, gives us a potential in the future to expand or improve our offering to the business.

If I had a colleague at another company that was concerned about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would tell them that if they're happy with the architecture, being a traditional file server type of design, then I would fully endorse Nasuni as a product. In particular, for the ease of migration and the performance thereafter. 

We have definitely gained insight from using Nasuni. For example, understanding how big our estate is in terms of data is something that we didn't accurately know before. We also have insights into how quickly the data we store is growing.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Nasuni would be that if you're currently using the traditional file server architecture, then this is definitely an improvement and reduces a lot of the complexities. If you are looking for a future-proof file storage solution, then you would need to consider things around how the new cloud files are being accessed or modified. For example, SharePoint, Google Docs, and Amazon WorkDocs are examples of things that require a different architecture.

Overall, our experience with Nasuni has been positive and it is difficult to say where it is that they can improve.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.