Nasuni is our file system. Our employees including, engineers, designers, and accounting, store files on the system. And we have the on-prem filer, so the office folks can use File Explorer to browse the drive and retrieve or store files.

Our remote users usually use VPN to access our files at our data center. At the data center we have one filer for the remote workers to access.

The data protection from Nasuni is extremely important. Back in December 2019, our company experienced a ransomware attack and pretty much all of our data got encrypted by the ransomware. Nasuni now provides backups and an easy-to-restore process in case of this type of disaster. We rely on the backups and restores tremendously. So far, we haven't had to use that feature, but Nasuni ensures that in the case of a ransomware or cybersecurity attack, they are able to restore all the data in the shortest amount of time.

We are trying to consolidate all our data platforms and toolsets with Nasuni as a single, global file system. It's just too difficult for IT to maintain various technologies and platforms. Nasuni serves as a single technology to give us more efficient processes and workflow. It's a good way to consolidate our technology. We're not there yet, where we have a complete view of all our data, but hopefully, in the next 12 to 18 months, we can get a 360-degree view of our users and increase productivity as well.

The continuous file versioning gives us peace of mind. In IT, we can sleep better at night knowing that Nasuni has backups. I actually just looked at the configuration recently because a VP was asking if our data was being backed up and, if yes, how often. It's being backed up daily and the frequency is every 15 minutes, on average. Every 15 minutes it takes a snapshot of our data. Throughout the day, there are plenty of snapshots to restore so that does give us peace of mind.

The feature I have found to be most valuable is the revision control of the files. If somebody deletes or accidentally makes a wrong change to files, we can go back to the revision history and restore the previous versions. That is a very good feature that we rely on. A minor file recovery, when we receive a help desk ticket from an employee claiming files are either missing or corrupted, usually takes less than 10 minutes.

We're able to provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on demand, and without limits. It provides the capacity we need now.

And Nasuni has built-in antivirus and anti-malware features, which we appreciate a lot. Although we have an endpoint security antivirus solution, you cannot be too careful. Another layer of security is really appreciated. We rely on that, and Nasuni constantly sends out alerts when it detects suspicious files on the system for us to clean up. That is a very good feature.

It's also quite easy for IT to manage. It's a very feature-rich platform. However, it is not too difficult to administer compared to other platforms that we have used in the past. Even when there is a new person in IT, when we train them on how to handle Nasuni and use its features. It's not too difficult.

We explored the Access Anywhere option because we need that type of feature for our international users, but the additional costs put us off. And to my knowledge, deploying Access Anywhere is not as easy and straightforward as we would like because you still have to deploy a physical or virtual filer to each site. Either way, you still need another layer, the filer, to enable Access Anywhere.

We have multiple offices and Nasuni replicates the changes pretty fast. When users from one office save their changes, their peers in another office can see the changes within minutes. Of course, this is an area for constant improvement and we hope that they can still reduce the amount of time it takes to replicate changes. The minimal wait time used to be much longer but they have improved it. They implemented something called Global File Acceleration that accelerated the replication and we appreciate that a lot.

Replication depends on a lot of factors, such as a site's internet speed, bandwidth, and congestion on the network. However, we hope the Nasuni team continues to strive for faster replication and makes it more efficient.

Another issue is that you can configure each filer to have web access. This is different from the Access Anywhere feature. You can create a web portal for a filer where a user can log in using their Active Directory credentials. We would like to enable multi-factor authentication for this type of web access to the filer. Relying only on Active Directory credentials is still not safe enough. We are using Duo multi-factor authentication and we would like to see Nasuni integrate with Duo so that we can further secure the access. To my knowledge, although I could be wrong, they don't have that yet.

In addition, Nasuni relies on a reseller, a middle-man. Our reseller is a company called SHI, and I am not happy with SHI's performance. I expressed this to our Nasuni account manager. I told him that every time we want to order a Nasuni filer, we have to go through SHI, but the performance has just not been competent and our point of contact has not been knowledgeable. Often, things have not been handled properly. SHI, on a scale of one to 10, with one being the lowest, would be about a 2 or 2.5. It fails miserably. The purchasing process, the shipping of new equipment, has actually wasted a lot of time and the inefficiency and delays all cost money. Nothing is wrong on the Nasuni side, rather it's all because of the reseller.

I have been using Nasuni for almost four years.

The reliability, compared to the past three platforms we have used, is very good. It is the most robust solution we have used, by far. It is very stable and definitely an enterprise-level solution.

We have about 450 users of Nasuni and our company is growing. If we open new office space, we will definitely consider adding an on-premises Nasuni filer, depending on how big the office is.

Nasuni's support is excellent and our account manager is great. If any ticket sits there for too long or I do not get the answer I am looking for, all I need to do is talk to our account manager. He will help escalate the ticket or he will locate an engineer to speak with me or our IT staff directly to get a clear answer. I would give their support team a very high score.

All our data on Nasuni is in the cloud, on AWS, but we do have an on-prem cache called filer.

Setting it up is not too difficult. It did not take that long. From zero to go-live with the Nasuni file system took around 60 days.

In terms of our cloud migration process, back in 2019, right after the ransomware attack, we salvaged as much good data as possible and put it on Nasuni. The cloud migration took a good five business days to fully migrate any good data that wasn't encrypted to the Nasuni AWS cloud.

We don't have a big IT team but maintaining Nasuni does not take a whole lot of resources.

It was just our It team working with the Nasuni engineers. And fast forward to now, every time we want to add an additional Nasuni cache filer, it's done in-house, and it takes between four and eight hours of work.

We definitely have a very good ROI.

The pricing is fair. It's an enterprise-level solution so it's not inexpensive. But when we grew to a certain level, we could no longer rely on what we call "mom and pop solutions", like Synology. For a small business that is just getting started and needs a file system, Synology is great. It's very affordable. But when you grow to a certain size, it can no longer handle the demand. Nasuni is one level up from that.

It also simplifies things, in terms of cash flow, if we want to expand our Nasuni solution. Nasuni does include fixed assets in the form of the on-prem cache filers. They are basically Dell servers. But the solution is straightforward for our budget and cash flow.

The cost is pretty stable year over year. We allocated part of our annual budget to make sure we cover our Nasuni overhead costs. It's easy to forecast what it's going to be.

Before we went with Nasuni, we tried three different products for file system replication: Synology, Global File System, and PeerGFS. They were not enterprise-level and did not work out. They each have their own problems that are too significant and led to a lot of business impact.

We have recently been exploring using SharePoint as our collaboration platform so that certain files would be stored on SharePoint. But I can still see Nasuni serving as our primary file system. While you can collaborate on the cloud, when a project is done you have to move the files to Nasuni for the security of the backups.

I would advise that if a company is similar in size to RRC, Nasuni is definitely worth considering. Whatever cloud solution you are heading toward, make sure it has the same type of security and backups that Nasuni provides. Anything less than that would be a step down from what we have today. I don't see a lot of economical cloud solutions out there that can rival the solid backup that Nasuni provides.

By default, Nasuni stores files either on Microsoft Azure or AWS. They allowed us to choose. We chose AWS because we are more familiar with it and because our company, RRC, also has a global workforce. We put it in the cloud so that our foreign workers could access the files. We have a big workforce in Asia and South America. We went with the cloud system to ensure that the access and performance were up to standard. We cannot afford any latency when our global workforce tries to use the file system.

We don't use the solution to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments. We tried VDI from different providers before, and it just did not work out. It mainly came down to two things. One was the cost per user, which was still a bit too high. At that time, it just didn't make sense for us. The second issue was that our engineers rely on AutoCAD, and when using VDI, the graphics in AutoCAD are not as smooth as when they are on a physical computer in front of them. The latency and lagging were a bit too much for our engineers.

In terms of reducing on-premises infrastructure, right now our workers are requesting to work from home more, so our offices have fewer workers coming in. The trend is that fewer and fewer of our users rely on the on-prem Nasuni cache filers. When they work from home, they have to dial in to our data center via VPN. In the next 12 to 24 months we may have a new set of worker dynamics and, at that time, the on-prem filer will have to be relocated to optimize access. But it's hard to predict what our workforce distribution will look like a year or two from now.