Nasuni Smites Storage Goliaths

On Tuesday Nasuni, a relative newcomer to storage, will officially unveil multisite access for its data continuity services. By extending file-level snapshots to create an architecture that allows multiple storage controllers to have live access to the same volume of snapshots, the new service provides organizations with a simple, safe and secure way to share data across any number of sites, says Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez.

Multisite does away with cumbersome replication schemes and frustratingly slow WAN optimizers, he says. It combines a file system that consolidates data from multiple locations into a single snapshot stream, with an encryption scheme that secures all data on customers’ premises. "We eliminate the data center as a barrier, putting the data in the service. Customers are calling this magic." It also moves Nasuni upmarket to large enterprises, he adds.

This could be huge for the storage industry, says Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "I think this is potentially very impactful because all of those downstream processes are no longer necessary if you use these guys for your primary file store, and that will make those who make lots of money on those processes unhappy." His main concern is that Nasuni is small and its major competitors are huge, so we'll have to wait and see what happens.

Features include the company's 100% uptime guarantee--accessible and available 100% of the time--AES-265 encryption, disaster recovery at the click of a button and performance on par with local storage controllers. The service is accessible either through a Nasuni virtual appliance (downloadable and available for a free evaluation version) or one of the company's hardware options at each site.

Duplessie says you can think of this as a primary file serving system that just so happens to provide local access to a single filer no matter where all your remote offices are. "In other words, it's just one filer to manage in total, not one for each office. It's truly universal--I make a change on a volume in Boston and it's automatically populated to Frankfurt, Tokyo and San Jose at the same time. Someone in Frankfurt updates a file, and it's instantly updated on my view in Boston."

"Second, and what's really cool to me, is not only does it make it absurdly easy for IT to now deal with remote sites, it eliminates all backup and data protection altogether," says Duplessie. "The Nasuni filer automatically backs itself up--you do nothing. No licenses, no tape, no nothing. That alone makes it worth a look."

Rodriguez says multisite access is game changing for remote offices/branch offices, taking just minutes to set up. Typically, ROBOs are resource-constrained, he says. "Here, you can put storage in a box and just use it."

The other significant differentiator is security, he says. "We could have launched the sharing service a year and a half ago. The challenge was security, where the customer was in control of the data. That's what the enterprise requires, not the service provider having access to the data at any point."

This is Nasuni's calling card on the large enterprise, says Rodriguez. From the last two months of experience, this is very attractive to larger organizations: "This is something that can't be delivered by the WAN optimization and large storage vendors. This is much more strategic for the delivery of storage as a service. This is primary storage at its best."

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Research: Cloud Storage (subscription required).