Tag Archives: nasuni

Nasuni Puts Your Data Where You Need It

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 21.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Nasuni recently presented at Storage Field Day 21. You can see videos of the presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

 

Nasuni?

The functionality is in the product name. It’s NAS that offers a unified file system across cloud. The key feature is that it’s cloud-native, rather than built on any particular infrastructure solution.

[image courtesy of Nasuni]

The platform is comprised of 5 key components.

UniFS

  • Consolidates files and metadata in cloud storage – “Gold Copy”
  • Ensures durability by storing files as immutable, read-only objects
  • Stores an unlimited version history of every file

Virtual Edge Appliances

  • Caches active files with 99% hit rate
  • 98% smaller footprint vs traditional file server / NAS
  • Scales across all sites, including VDI
  • Supports standard file sharing protocols
  • Built-in web server enables remote file access via web browser (HTTP)

Management Console

  • Administers appliances, volumes, shares and file recovery
  • Automated through central GUI and REST API
  • Provides centralised monitoring, reporting, and alerting

Orchestration Center

  • Multi-site file sync keeps track of versions
  • Advanced version control with Nasuni Global File Lock
  • Multi-region cloud support to ensure performance

Analytics Connector

  • Translates file data into native object storage format
  • Leverage any public cloud services (AI, data analytics, search)
  • Multi-cloud support so you can run any cloud service against your data

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I’m the first to admit I’ve had a bit of a blind spot for Nasuni for a little while now. Not because I think the company doesn’t do cool stuff – it really does. Rather, my former employer was an investor in the tech and was keen to see how we could use the platform in every opportunity. Even when the opportunity wasn’t appropriate.

Distributed storage for file sharing has been a pain in the rear for enterprises ever since enterprises have been a thing. The real challenge has been doing something sensible about managing data across multiple locations in a cogent fashion. As local becomes global, this becomes even more of an issue, particularly when folks all across the world need to work on the same data. Email isn’t really great for this, and some of those sync and share solutions don’t cope well with the scale that is sometimes required. In the end, file serving is still a solution that can solve a problem for a lot of enterprise use cases.

The advent of public cloud has been great in terms of demonstrating that workloads can be distributed, and you don’t need to have a bunch of tin sitting in the office to get value from infrastructure. Nasuni recognised this over ten years ago, and it has put together a platform that seeks to solve that problem by taking advantage of the distributed nature of cloud, whilst acknowledging that virtualised resources can make for a useful local presence when it comes to having the right data in the right place. One of my favourite things about the solution is that you can also do stuff via the Analytics Connector to derive further value from your unstructured data. This is not a unique feature, but it’s certainly something that gives the impression that Nasuni isn’t just here to serve up your data.

The elegance of the Nasuni solution is in the fact that the complexity is well hidden from the end user. It’s a normal file access experience, but it’s hosted in the cloud. When you contrast that with what you get from the sync solutions of the world or the clumsy web-based document management systems so prevalent in the enterprise, this kind of simplicity is invaluable. It’s my opinion that there is very much a place for this kind of solution in the marketplace. The world is becoming increasingly global, but we still need solutions that can provide data where we need it. We also need those solutions to accommodate the performance and resilience needs of the enterprise.

If you’re after a great discussion on storage options for the distributed enterprise, check out Enrico’s article over at GigaOm.

Storage Field Day 21 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 21.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as a conference attendee at Storage Field Day 21. This is by no stretch an interesting post from a technical perspective, but it’s a way for me to track and publicly disclose what I get and how it looks when I write about various things. With all of … this stuff … happening, it’s not going to be as lengthy as normal, but I did receive a couple of boxes of stuff in the mail, so I wanted to disclose it.

The Tech Field Day team sent a keyboard cloth (a really useful thing to save the monitor on my laptop from being bashed against the keyboard), a commemorative TFD coin, and some TFD patches. The team also sent me a snack pack with a variety of treats in it, including Crunch ‘n Munch caramel popcorn with peanuts, fudge brownie M&M’s, Pop Rocks, Walker’s Monster Munch pickled onion flavour baked corn snacks, peanut butter Cookie Dough Bites, Airheads, Razzles, a giant gobstopper, Swedish Fish, a Butterfinger bar, some Laffy Taffy candy, Hershey’s Kisses, Chewy Lemonhead, Bottlecaps, Airheads, Candy Sours and Milk Duds. I don’t know what most of this stuff is but I guess I’ll find out. I can say the pickled onion flavour baked corn snacks were excellent.

Pliops came through with the goods and sent me a Lume Cube Broadcast Lighting Kit. Hammerspace sent a stainless steel water bottle and Hammerspace-branded Leeman notepad. Nasuni threw in a mug, notepad, and some pens, while NetApp gave me a travel mug and notepad. Tintri kindly included a Tintri trucker cap, Tintri-branded hard drive case and Tintri-branded OGIO backpack in the swag box.

My Secret Santa gift was the very excellent “Working for the clampdown: The Clash, the dawn of neoliberalism and the political promise of punk“, edited by Colin Coulter.

It wasn’t fancy food and limos this time around. But it was nonetheless an enjoyable event. Hopefully we can get back to in-person events some time this decade. Thanks again to Stephen and the team for having me back.

Updated Articles Page

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I recently had the opportunity to deploy a Nasuni NMC and filer in the lab and thought I’d run through the basics. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.