Nasuni Edge for Amazon S3

I am currently using Nasuni  for seismic data. We have a huge data size, and we want to reduce costs. Nasuni  acts as a caching solution, so we put some data into the cache, and the rest goes to the blob, which helps us save on costs. We use it for applications like Petrol and Tech Log, where 3D modeling is important.

The features I find most valuable in Nasuni are the unlimited snapshots, antivirus capabilities, auditing, and ransomware protection. Version control is also helpful, as we have almost all of our Nasuni deployments on a single version. Although upgrading involves some downtime, it's easy to upgrade and manage version control.

I suggest Nasuni improve their syslog forwarders to support TCP protocol, as it's more secure than UDP, which is plain text and not protected at all. Also, there should be improvements in automated load balancing since scaling requires manual load balancing.

I have been working with Nasuni for around four years.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the stability of Nasuni as nine.

I rated the scalability as seven because even though the solution can scale, load balancing must be done manually, as it's not automated.

I rarely contact tech support, as we usually rely on our technical account manager. My interactions with tech support are limited to two or three cases a year.

Positive

I have experience with NetApp  and EMC Isilon. However, the solution choice depends on specific requirements. For instance, cloud support led us to choose between Nasuni and NetApp .

The initial setup of Nasuni is simple. However, setting up monitoring and alerting increases the complexity to a medium level.

We managed the setup in-house without any integrators or consultants.

I prefer solutions with lower pricing. I would rate Nasuni's pricing as eight since I consider it to be reasonably priced.

Compared to Nasuni, main competitors are NetApp and EMC Isilon.

I would recommend Nasuni to other users considering their data requirements. Overall, I would give Nasuni a rating of eight.

We use Nasuni  for our network file servers. My company switched from Windows file servers to Nasuni , and we leveraged it to manage migrations between data centers.

The storage is fully in the cloud, and we are starting to migrate more as a company towards the cloud. I would say today, we have about a quarter of our overall workload in the cloud.  However, in the next few years, we will shift even further into the cloud.

Nasuni helps us streamline file storage and access across multiple locations. That's why we bought it. We had performance issues with a single Windows file server in one location when we had users and data centers in multiple locations. The technology enables us to make data more local to multiple different locations for users. We've been able to consolidate some of our file systems. We've combined SMB file shares and NFS into a single product.

The solution improved our organization by simplifying management and helping us to consolidate products. It makes recovery easier and ensures high resiliency. It has reduced our management overhead by about 30 percent. We used to have two different teams—managed NFS and managed SMB. We've consolidated collapsed teams, which is good from a support perspective. Also, we don't need to patch and upgrade the capabilities as much anymore.

It hasn't affected how our business operates much, but that's the great thing about it. It's a service that nobody notices, and if nobody notices, we're doing our job. It's reliable enough to where nobody's complaining about their file storage needs.

Nasuni is easy to manage and highly resilient. Resiliency is critical. We had a data center outage, but we were then able to repoint people to one of our other filers easily and keep everything available. It's an excellent hybrid cloud product. I like the unlimited snapshotting. The visibility is pretty good, but we aren't leveraging all the capabilities to give us a 360 view. The solution allows us to provide file storage on demand. That capability is essential. 

We only use Nasuni's snapshotting features. We're primarily using other third-party security products for data protection. I'd love to use Nasuni's data protection features, but our security team wants to use their own stuff. Nasuni's continuous file versioning has saved us a couple of times. It just makes recovery effortless. It's a self-service feature where users can recover their own files if necessary.

There are some issues with multiple users accessing the same file simultaneously. There would be times when the global file would lock when several people tried to access it, so that could be optimized more.

We have used Nasuni since 2018.

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10 for stability. We have had a few bugs and issues along the way, but it's been pretty good overall. I wouldn't say it's flawless. 

Nasuni is scalable. We have over 5,000 users. 

I rate Nasuni support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We previously used Windows File Servers. Nasuni costs more but we obtained some excellent features that we didn't have before. 

Setting up Nasuni is very straightforward. It's easy. It took us about four months, but we were moving a ton of data. We completed the migration in a reasonable amount of time. 

I can't quantify the ROI precisely. It isn't significant, but we've seen some benefits. 

Nasuni is cost-effective. It's a relatively affordable solution. We compared it with other products and felt like it was a good price.

We considered a few options, including Panzura , HPE, Amazon, CTERA Edge, and Cohesity .

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10. I recommend doing a POC before implementing Nasuni. Make  it your primary filer tool and take time to understand your server sizing. 

We implement Nasuni for our customers. We also manage the solution and provide support. Our client is a global company that operates worldwide with a user base in the thousands. We have a 20-person team working with them. 

Nasuni has helped us to simplify infrastructure purchasing and support. The solution enabled us to replace multiple data silos and toolsets with a single file system.

I'm unsure how much money it saves, but I believe Nasuni has helped by eliminating on-site hardware. We don't need to manage the big storage devices on-site. We only need a single server that can access the cache and device from the Nasuni site.

Nasuni eliminates the need for on-prem backend storage because everything goes to the cloud. You only need to have a caching device on-site. That's the main requirement. We don't have to worry about backups or require an additional backup solution.

It provides a 360-degree view of file data, and we can provide unlimited file storage capacity on demand. Nasuni also has built-in data protection, but the client isn't using some of the features because of the performance impact. Ransomware protection is enabled because of HR-related issues.

The Access Anywhere makes it easier for administrators to manage than local on-prem storage. Nasuni is tremendously easy to manage. It eliminates many of the administrative challenges associated with physical hardware storage, and you don't need to worry about any hardware failure or products reaching the end of their lives. 

As administrators, we are used to having control equal to managing an on-prem device. In terms of log analysis and other things we want to do, Nasuni has some limitations. Nasuni could add some features to the GUI that would make administration a little easier. It's tough when I have to move from one filter to another because there is no way to search it. We have to scroll up and down to find the name of it.

There are also some performance issues. We often have users complain about the speed of accessing some files. It could be due to the different kinds of buckets they have chosen in the back end on the cloud or their network infrastructure and the kind of bandwidth they have between their office and the cloud. It may not be entirely an issue on the Nasuni end. 

We have used Nasuni for nearly three years.

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Nasuni 10 out of 10.

I rate Nasuni support nine out of 10. 

Positive

I believe the initial setup was easy. Another team handles deployment, so we're not involved. 

I rate Nasuni nine out of 10. We are very happy with this technology. Nasuni is an excellent choice if you need data storage. I'm unsure how it will work for things like VDI or a virtualized environment. I also don't know if it's a good choice for high-performance applications or databases. I haven't worked with it for those use cases, but if you want some data storage in the back end, it's a solid option.

I used Nasuni for a client in the energy sector. Their entire subsurface storage portfolio is in Microsoft Azure. They have different types of storage, like database storage, blob storage, and what we call project storage. In Azure, there's also something called AFS or Azure file storage. 

We use Nasuni in a couple of ways. The primary use is to act as a sort of surveillance tool for managing our storage on Microsoft Azure. Natsuni also has options for storing data. We're managing our data inside of Nasuni. We allocate specific resources and server volumes. We use Nasuni to monitor our storage space and tell us when it will run out of space. 

It helped us manage some analytics out of there. Every cloud provider has a cost attached to every type of storage. We can do an economic analysis on our storage between Nasuni and Microsoft Azure. We've found that Nasuni storage is cheaper on some fronts, so we use Nasuni to copy some of the data from Microsoft Azure into Nasuni Storage. If I had to summarize it, Nasuni is a storage management, control, and surveillance platform that we use. We also use it to gain some useful insights into the cost and economics of storing data in these two different environments.

We weren't using Nasuni when we initially moved all our data and applications from on-prem to the public cloud, but we quickly realized that it was a valuable platform for economic reasons and ease of use. A year or two after we migrated to the cloud, we brought Nasuni on board and could use it. Some other people might not have felt it was such a good tool, but our focus was always cost reduction and economical cloud computing. Nasuni played a significant role in that.

Nasuni reduced the cost on Azure because we realized that we could be more economical about our storage. Hard data is the most expensive storage option in Azure. Using Nasuni for hard data storage saved us almost half the cost. It enabled a quick reduction of monthly costs per terabyte. We realized some cost savings when we moved chunks of data over, so we decided to increase data migration from Azure to Nasuni. It was around a 40 to 45 percent reduction in cost. One year, we needed to save around $1 million dollars. Moving the data also enabled us to clean up that data much faster than we could in Azure.

The solution has helped us adapt to organizational changes. The company operates in multiple regions. Some nations have restrictions on taking the data out of the country.  Countries in the Middle East or North Africa have export restrictions. We set up a specific area and connected it to Nasuni inside that region, so we could easily configure Nasuni to help us with these export restrictions. It has a quick turnaround. If we needed to decommission volumes quickly, it was easy to copy data from one volume into another. We're using NetApp file servers, and it works really well with NetApp. I could use a tool that connects directly to Nasuni, copies data out of there or into it, and then the commission within volumes. We see the benefits almost immediately. It's highly flexible. It requires more intensive configuration on certain tools in Microsoft Azure or AWS, but Nasuni made it simple.

I was never involved in infrastructure purchasing, but Nasuni is very dynamic from my perspective. When we increased our quota or added new volumes, it was almost instantaneous. It took minimal time to spin up new storage devices or volumes. It's pretty much the same across public cloud providers or on-prem. 

Nasuni helped us break down some silos and remove some solutions we had in the past. Moving from on-prem to a public cloud does a lot to break down silos. It just helps us manage our storage better. Nasuni adds some intelligence to it. Back in the day, we had Windows file storage. 

The solution gives us a breakdown and summary of every resource and each volume within every resource. It tells us the code within a given volume, so I can go in there and look at the size of the files that are stored there. Nasuni gives me the big picture and allows me to connect things like Power BI to any endpoint. I can take that tabular information from Nasuni and look at it in a graph. 

Nasuni does have some graphic capabilities, but it allows me to connect Power BI to it and report that data to management so that we can make decisions about costs and all that from a long-term perspective. These cloud providers have tools for this. AWS has CloudWatch, and Azure has a complete billing system that lets you look at changes in storage, but it requires a lot of flipping switches in and out of different volumes. The nice thing about Nasuni is that I can see every volume on one page. 

Nasuni provides storage on demand. I can go in there to increase my quotas or set a trigger for it to increase automatically. For example, if a volume hits 95 percent capacity, I could schedule it to increase that volume by a quarter. We don't want unlimited storage because there's a cost associated with that, so we didn't want to go the route of automatically triggering it each time. We do a lot of data governance where we try to clean out these volumes as much as possible, but we have some flexibility to increase storage in a semi-automated manner as needed.

We tried Access Anywhere but didn't have a big user community using it. It was also clunky at times. We preferred to connect the visualization tools to the data and Nasuni. That was more beneficial than using Access Anywhere. However, Access Anywhere was helpful when you have limited access outside of the company network. The network infrastructure enabled us to log into the company when we worked remotely. It enabled us to meet and log straight into the console. I didn't have to use it that much, but it came in handy when needed.

Natsuni has made our lives much easier. The interface is simple. It doesn't have much drill-down capability, but it's very intuitive. It does things stepwise, from large to fine-grained, so it does a good job at that, allowing me to switch between different views quite easily. It's context-aware. I can switch to quotas and look at quotas in a specific volume. There are a lot of nice drop-down menus where I can find my specific volume. I don't think there's a large learning curve for a specific type of user. Configuring and setting it up might become a little more complicated, but we always have good support from Nasuni. They walked us through it and provided a lot of documentation.

Nasuni's continuous file versioning feature has helped us plan for disaster recovery better. We use a two-pronged approach. The public cloud providers have decent recovery offerings because they have multiple availability zones and different regions in which you can replicate your data. However, Nasuni enables us to back up our data in a much more cost-efficient and flexible manner. It's not as bureaucratic as Microsoft or AWS. It is already broken down. The disaster recovery panel is a lot simpler. We don't have to wait for weeks. Unfortunately,  disaster recovery is something you really only test when there's an actual disaster, but we've tested it in a controlled environment, and it's proven to be more economical in that sense than Azure or AWS.

We've never had much of a problem with file versioning because our other tools do a good job of how they manage the actual project data. Nasuni has specific areas of data that would be stored on-site. We had broken it down. We have another tool with multiple user folders for specific individuals. The individual is responsible for saving the latest version of the data, but it's time-stamped so the user can go back and recover all levels of the projects and data that was inside it. That approach is standalone, but we never had any problems with versioning or how we can recover files. When someone has deleted something by mistake, it was pretty easy to go into our volume and restore it from the day or week before or whatever the backup plan was.

It can provide a 360-degree view of your data, depending on how you implement it and whether you're storing your data in Nasuni. However, if you're working with multiple cloud providers, I don't think it's mature enough to provide a 360-degree view of what's in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. I think it can do it, but it's still a lot of scope and range fitting. Given that Nasuni storage is actually cheaper in some areas, it made sense for us to move a lot of our data away from Microsoft. Nasuni gave us more of a 360 view of that particular data type. 

Other data types are a little different because the company went in a direction where they wanted to store some stuff in an AWS S3 bucket rather than a file storage system. An S3 bucket has its advantages, but if you were to store more of your data in Nasuni, you would get a wider 360-degree view of it rather than on several cloud providers.

I have data in AWS, Google, and Azure, and I would like to see a wider view of all the data stored across these three top providers. Currently, I use it for AWS and Azure, but I couldn't use both of them at the same time. I think Nasuni could have better visibility across these different areas. I had to take my data out and then do some analysis to get the costs. 

It would be helpful to have more built-in analytics tools to compare the storage costs between the various cloud providers. I would also like some graphing capabilities. We had a tool called Grafana that we used for graphing. I think some more visual analytics like that would be nice.

I have used Nasuni for around 18 months.

I have contacted Nasuni support via email for specific questions. They always answered my questions quickly, and the turnaround time was less than a day. They were open to providing support and answering questions directly without extra meetings or involving a lot more people. They didn't just direct me to the manual, which many support people will do. They took the complexity out of it and assigned the correct person to the incident. 

Someone had to train me to deploy Nasuni, but it wasn't terribly complex because I have a background in Linux storage management and Windows file management. It wasn't a considerable learning curve. Obviously, I needed to get accustomed to using the interface, but everybody on my team could quickly pick it up once they had access to it and started using it. It has a high fault tolerance.  It doesn't allow you to make a significant change if you don't have the right access. You can roll back certain things if you make a mistake. It spins up pretty quickly, and you can add a lot of volumes easily. You can survey all your data efficiently, so I found it easy to use.

It took about three to six months to implement Nasuni. You have to onboard it and look at the security of bringing it inside of the VPN network. The compliance and risk management aspects took time. Our overall cloud migration experience was good. Like a lot of projects, it took longer than expected because we needed to manage a lot of risks and budget. It was a process of learning and modifying things. It didn't go according to plan but became easier as we grew into it. Our challenge has always been the volume of data. We employed a lot of tools to help us either put data in cool storage or delete it. For me, it was a great experience. Dealing with people is harder than dealing with machinery and computers.

Two or three people from Nasuni were assigned to our account. They were highly available. When I sent any emails, I got responses in under a day. There's also a hotline with 24-hour access if we need it. We can escalate something pretty quickly.

Nasuni has facilitated our cloud strategy, which aims to reduce the total cost of ownership relative to on-prem. Microsoft Azure has played a significant role in that, but there's so much data out there. In addition to transitioning from on-prem to the cloud, one of our strategies is to manage the storage levels. Nasuni helped us divide our storage into cold and hot. The data we defined as hot storage is continuously used daily for operations. Warm storage would be storage that's used around six months out of the year. Cold storage might not be used every year. That includes things like financials, events, reservoir performance, documents, and things that we only look at around once a year. 

It helped us to develop a fine-grade strategy with the cloud by giving us some storage tools and advice on how we should move storage around for cool storage to work. We also moved a bunch of applications to Azure. We have Nasuni storage, blob storage, file storage, and Azure desktop file storage. Nasuni is a good tool that I can plug into different public cloud providers. That's why it was chosen as part of the strategy. We have one picture of several different public cloud providers that are available to us.

There's a whole suite of advantages there. It reduced the cost of ownership and also automated the experience of sitting by my desk and requesting a new volume or more storage devices rather than going through our entire procurement and supply chain process. A lot of that complexity was hidden. I showed it went to someone else to approve it and go up the chain of command.

I rate Nasuni eight out of 10. Definitely consider it. Often, the public cloud providers are not the most economical storage option, and they don't do everything. Many people think that if you take your data off of on-prem and move it to Azure or AWS, all your problems are solved. That is not true. People should look at a lot of smaller third-party solutions like Nasuni and do a proof of concept. 

You don't need to dive into it, but you can take specific use cases and try them out on these tools. There are so many tools out there like Nasuni, but Nasuni has experience in the energy industry and specific data types and volumes of data. I would definitely look into it. Don't rule it out.  The tools are getting better. The public cloud providers are providing serverless computing and those kinds of things. Don't write Nasuni off. Keep it as an option. It is more than a surveillance tool. It's a storage option because we saved a lot of money moving data from Azure to Nasuni.

We have one parent file system connected to three Nasuni systems. One is in the APAC region, and two are located in the US. The file system is connected across all three locations so that people can access the file system anywhere in the network. 

It's connected to object storage in the background, and we have some capacity there. We have a license of up to 500 TB that we manage, including all the data required for archiving or anything. We use it to create a backup pool in our cloud object storage and only use it for full backup.

We use Nasuni for daily activities. For example, some file shares have assigned tools and servers. People use it to create some requests for data recovery when data on the server is lost. The user asks us to create a new location from Nasuni. We also have some patches that must be updated on the cloud each month, and I'll use Nasuni to monitor any issues. 

Nasuni enabled us to eliminate on-premise infrastructure. This is an important benefit everyone should know about. If you have some kind of VDI environment, people don't want to lose access. Once you have this availability option, it makes your data access seamless if there are any outages.  

We like Nasuni's snapshot technology. The snapshot and recovery features are the things we use most frequently. Ideally, I would recommend NFS or CFS, which gives you more benefits for clients or anyone who wants to access FTP protocol, FTP utilities, SAN, and MSS.

The visibility Nasuni provides is top-notch. When there is an issue in the environment, and you open a ticket, they immediately come into the picture and help you find the solution.

Nasuni's data protection is crucial for our organization. All of the file systems we manage are protected. We're protected if users accidentally delete files or move data from one file system to another. We can recover the data using the snapshot functionality.

You can see whether your data is protected from the console. From there, you can view the missing data and recover it. Every device is visible in a centralized monitoring tool we call the MMC console. It can discover all the nodes or the necessary systems that are managed in the environment.

It's a user-friendly tool with a beautiful graphical interface. Anyone can use the management interface. If you're a layperson who doesn't know how to use Nasuni, I would only need to teach you the fundamentals of NAS technology.

Some applications may not be suited for the Nasuni environment. You may need something with better performance. Otherwise, if you want to run daily operations or some file system, it's a good bet. 

I have worked with Nasuni for three years.

I rate Nasuni seven out of 10 for stability. Nasuni is a stable solution if you understand the environment, and you've properly designed your environment. 

We can expand file storage capacity on-demand and without limitations.

I'm in India, and our support comes from the US, so it's always a little bit difficult to engage Nasuni during non-business hours. I would recommend providing support during the working hours of other regions. 

I don't think we use Natsuni for VDI environments. We do have another environment that uses NetApp.

Setting up Nasuni is straightforward, but it can be complicated to connect it with the technology on the back end. Nasuni is built on the cloud, and there's an appliance on top of that. The initial setup only takes five to 10 minutes. The deployment of Natsuni is very simple. It involves creating a VM in the cloud, and you create a Nasuni image on top of that. In our case, the back end is an IBM product.

Nasuni is cost-effective. If you need something that delivers a lot of value for the cost, Nasuni is a good thing. 

I rate Nasuni seven out of 10. It isn't an ideal solution for all applications you have in your environment. If I'm an IT person, I do have a lot of other applications sitting in there, so I might need to adopt some other storage vendor for those. I might need to procure some other storage technology for other applications if I'm a business person, for example.