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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.