Nasuni Blog

Nasuni in 90 Seconds

Louis Abate — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Storage Infrastructure has always meant two things: Lots of hardware - and lots of work. And every new office is just one more headache. You could go directly to the cloud, but then you would be sacrificing performance and security – and let’s be honest, do you really want to trust someone else with one of your most valuable assets? Well, Nasuni has figured out how to take on-premises hardware and combine it with the cloud to give you everything you expect from storage infrastructure. Except it's not what you…

Connecting with the Cloud on a Sunny Day

Karen Kiffney — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:00:00 -0400

Some members of the Nasuni team (myself included) are spending a few days on the “other coast” attending Cloud Connect and soaking up some Vitamin D in sunny Santa Clara, CA. It’s great being out here around so many people talking about the cloud and innovative ways to leverage technology to solve real business problems. We’ve had great conversations with fellow vendors and have been talking about everything from security to payments not to mention talking to attendees and answering their…

Nasuni's In-house IT Infrastructure Gets an Upgrade

Louis Abate — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:00:00 -0500

We're growing! That seems to be the go-to excuse to help justify the constant state of construction seen at Nasuni HQ. This most recent project isn't too bad (so far only two walls knocked down) and when it is complete there will be a lot of happy engineers on the other side of the building! Our latest project is an IT infrastructure revamp. Now, I know what you're thinking... Aren't you guys all about REDUCING hardware? Absolutely! Delivering storage infrastructure as a service not only enables our customers to…

How Does Nasuni Evaluate a Cloud Storage Provider?

Connor Fee — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:30:00 -0500

Earlier this month, we introduced our 2013 State of Cloud Storage Report in which we shared some of the metrics and analysis we use when evaluating Cloud Storage Providers (CSPs). The report caused quite a stir as we announced that Microsoft Azure Blob Storage had replaced Amazon S3 as the top performer in this year’s report. We even put the whole thing in a fun infographic for those of you like me who like pretty pictures! Our annual report evaluates CSPs according to three metrics: Raw Benchmark…

Introducing Nasuni 4.5 – Delivering Advancements in Mobile

Karen Kiffney — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Nasuni led the market last year with the introduction of Nasuni Mobile, becoming the first storage vendor to deliver a native app for mobile devices and browser-based access. This innovative solution enables users to securely access corporate data from any Android, or iOS device. Since the release of Nasuni Mobile, we have seen widespread adoption as companies have worked to address the challenges of Shadow IT and the use of consumer-focused solutions such as Dropbox for work-related files. With…

How Did the Azure Outage Impact Nasuni?

Connor Fee — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:00:00 -0500

On Friday night Azure’s Blob Storage became unavailable for thousands of customers. Service was largely restored within 12 hours, but there was quite a lot of noise on Twitter and blogs from frustrated users. Isn’t cloud storage supposed to be available? Isn’t uptime part of why you pay for the cloud? Cloud storage outages occur from time to time - and no one Cloud Storage Provider (CSP) is immune. Amazon has had several public outages over the last few years. These outages impact anyone using the…

Comparing Cloud Storage Providers in 2013 - Infographic

Connor Fee — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 09:00:00 -0500

Today, Nasuni introduced our 2013 State of Cloud Storage report. It’s an in-depth look at the major publicly available Cloud Storage Providers (CSPs) along the dimensions of performance, availability and scalability. For enterprises seriously considering cloud storage as part of their storage infrastructure, it’s a must read. That being said, we understand that most people have the attention span of a goldfish hopped up on speed so we created this handy infographic. Enjoy! If you like what you see and want to…

Inteva Products: Transforming Data Storage and Access Infrastructure Across the Globe

Karen Kiffney — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:00:00 -0500

Inteva Products, a multi-billion dollar global tier-one supplier to major car manufacturers with 42 offices spanning 18 countries and 4 continents is rolling out Nasuni Storage Infrastructure as-a-Service to transform their data storage and access infrastructure. Every employee at Inteva is laser-focused on the manufacturing side of the business; capital investment is largely reserved for tools and equipment. In addition, the IT department is managing infrastructure in dozens of offices. In fact, the number of offices…

Will Cloud Storage Replace WAN Acceleration?

Karen Kiffney — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:00:00 -0500

Data storage is a misnomer – organizations today aren’t investing in storage solutions because they want to store data the same way people store furniture in a storage locker. Organizations are working to make data available whenever and wherever it is needed – oftentimes across many offices spread out over multiple locations. Data storage isn’t about storing data– it’s about enabling access and distribution of data. But, it’s not just a terminology mishap. The traditional storage infrastructure is designed to…

High Speed Chase - Hard Drives are Heading to the Cloud

Andres Rodriguez — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:30:00 -0500

Amazon deployed more storage capacity last year than any other single storage company. Conservative estimates put Amazon at close to an exabyte of data under management. AWS S3 is not only the largest single storage system ever deployed, its capacity dwarfs the shipping capacity of any one of the traditional storage companies: EMC, NetApp, HDS, Dell, HP and IBM. As a matter of fact, the combined capacity shipped by the traditional storage vendors is just over twice what Amazon, albeit the largest of the…

IT Policies: A Band-Aid that Won’t Stick

Karen Kiffney — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Shadow IT is quickly becoming a frequently used term, as well as an area of concern for many IT executives. [If you are not familiar with the term, Shadow IT is defined as: IT systems and solutions used inside an organization without organizational approval.] In our recent survey, we learned that: Corporate IT users are leveraging consumer-focused file sharing services in large numbers The use of personal mobile devices to access work related files is very common and growing The third part of the survey…

Mobile in the Enterprise: It’s Getting Personal

Karen Kiffney — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0500

It is well understood that users accessing work files on a personal mobile device put corporate information at risk. Information accessed and stored on a personal device is outside of the management and control of IT and is therefore at risk for unintended exposure or loss. In a recent survey conducted by Nasuni, more than 1,000 corporate IT users were polled in order to gain a baseline understanding for the number of users leveraging personal mobile devices for work. We learned: 58 percent of employees…

Think Your Company Data Isn’t in Dropbox? Think Again.

Karen Kiffney — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0500

We talk to companies all the time that have concerns about users putting company information in Dropbox. But, no one we talk to really knows how common Dropbox is in their organization, or who is really using the service. So, we decided to conduct a survey and ask more than 1,000 corporate IT users about their habits regarding file-sharing services. We were surprised about some of the things we learned, such as: 1 out of every 5 corporate IT users is using Dropbox for work. So, if you are still wondering if…

Coming Soon: Nasuni 4.4

Karen Kiffney — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:00:00 -0500

The engineering team here at Nasuni is putting the finishing touches on version 4.4 in preparation for release next week. The updates in this release fall into two main categories: improvements to the Nasuni Filer user interface (UI) and changes to the licensing and installation process. Regular users of the Nasuni Filer will immediately notice the improvements to the user interface. The overall look is cleaner – content is more organized, colors are more consistent and text is easier to read. While these changes…

What Does an Amazon Outage Mean for Nasuni Customers?

Connor Fee — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:30:00 -0400

What happens when the cloud goes down? If you’ve been following Nasuni for any time, you may have seen this question before. It is the title of an excellent blog post by one of our senior engineers. In it, Jesse Noller discusses what happens when Amazon (one of our cloud storage backends) goes “down.” Specifically he discusses the several components of the Amazon architecture and how Nasuni uses them. Given the recent outage of Elastic Block Storage, EBS, in Amazon’s Northern Virginia location on…

Amazon Glacier – Archive in the Clouds

Connor Fee — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Anytime Amazon makes a big announcement relating to their cloud offering you can bet it will create a buzz in the storage industry. Last week Amazon introduced Glacier – and there was quite a bit of buzz! They describe it as: "Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup." Anyone who has been following Nasuni knows we are primary storage - not backup, and especially not archiving. Nonetheless, Glacier is 10x cheaper than…

Why Traditional Storage is Not Suited to Remote Offices

Connor Fee — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Accurately predicting storage growth today is nearly impossible, whether you’re concerned with headquarters or a branch office. Recently we interviewed several of our enterprise customers to develop a better sense of the problems associated with managing storage remotely, and although we were not surprised to hear that foreseeing growth is a challenge, our clients pointed out several additional difficulties when it comes to addressing this challenge at branch offices. IT has to ensure that every office is…

Avoiding the Headaches of Remote Storage Management

Louis Abate — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:00:00 -0400

Today, when enterprise companies open offices in new regions or even continents, IT does not always grow accordingly. Instead, they are often forced to set up, provision, and manage these new branches from a distance. Of course, problems always pop up, and they cannot always be solved remotely. We interviewed several of our customers to learn more about the challenges of remote storage management across distributed enterprises. A shortage of personnel was one of the recurring themes: One of…

Remote Should Not Be Removed: Extending Data Access Across the Enterprise

Louis Abate — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 11:00:00 -0400

A global enterprise needs to function as a seamless organization, granting all end users fast access to files, whether they’re at headquarters or a three person branch on the other side of the world. This is not an easy task and it often becomes a major source of IT pain. We recently interviewed several customers to gain a better understanding of the pain points associated with managing storage remotely and the best practices for overcoming them. As we learned during the interviews, the technical challenges…

The Emerging Objects Versus Files Debate

Rob Mason — Tue, 08 May 2012 10:00:00 -0400

A few weeks ago I spent an hour with a new analyst to the storage space over at TechTarget and one of the topics we covered was object versus file based storage systems. Wikipedia has a workable definition of object based storage: An Object-based Storage Device (OSD) is a computer storage device, similar to disk storage but working at a higher level. Instead of providing a block-oriented interface that reads and writes fixed sized blocks of data, an OSD organizes data into flexible-sized data containers, …