https://vimeo.com/277731640

It’s been a few years since I have seen the designs and implementation abilities from Nasuni, and so I was looking forward to their presentation at Storage Field Day 16. They have historically positioned themselves as essentially a Big File Server, and essentially, they still are. Largely scalable, file-based services for the enterprise, with scalability based on namespace, but so very much more.

Imagine, a very easy to use, easy to manage, and highly secure, file server, with erasure encoding, and real-time replication to as many sites you may need, location awareness, and version control with locking. As I said this is a file-based system, supporting SMB protocol, but again, much more. While they don’t like to envision themselves as a gateway, there is certainly a gateway functionality. You’re writing to standard SMB protocol, so there’s an inherent ease, particularly to Windows, Active Directory users, but a native connection to object based benefits. Thus, when your users wish to access theirs, or others’ files in remote based locations, this is accomplished quite easily. All one must do is set up a Nasuni based peer (which can be physical or virtual) in whatever other datacenter, the big ones (AWS, for example, with GCP coming soon), where the number of devices can grow easily, by simply deploying another virtual device, rapidly, on an OVF type delivery method, wherever and whenever appropriate. Incidentally, one is able to deploy these virtual appliances essentially endlessly, as they’re no-charge implementations.

Nasuni uses a somewhat revolutionary “UNIfs” or Universal File System, which is a global one, offering infinite file, directory, and volume size, on this global file system. Works also, with a fully manageable Restful API, that can be scripted as well.

According to Tom Rose, the Chief Marketing Officer, for this really great solution, the idea is and has been from the start, a way in which to facility rapid growth, work from home initiatives, and the ever-present desire to “Drive to the Cloud” motivations that are the subject of many of the conversations in which I find myself involved in my day-to-day conversations with my customers. What was seen just a couple years ago as disruptive is now seen as simple mainstream initiatives.

In this world of storage, where the prevalence of file-based storage is growing at a rate of 10 times that of block based storage, and the drive to the cloud is prevalent, a simple, scalable, manageable, and well thought out licensing model, requiring growth without necessarily buying more disc onsite, and availability wherever and however desired, is a real solution, bringing the kind of functionality to these solutions, allowing they type of growth we see and desire for our organizations. I see this as particularly beneficial in my patch, where companies with minds toward acquisition, and global reach, even where compliance issues abound, as data sovereignty issues and regulations occur regularly can benefit. The way in which organizations can now migrate their storage into a global namespace, to me is a function, that also offers some compelling use-case.