NASUNI GLOBAL STORAGE POOL

What is our primary use case? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with Nasuni for around four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the stability of Nasuni as nine. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I rated the scalability as seven because even though the solution can scale, load balancing must be done manually, as it's not automated. How are customer service and support? 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. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? 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. How was the initial setup? The initial setup of Nasuni is simple. However, setting up monitoring and alerting increases the complexity to a medium level. What about the implementation team? We managed the setup in-house without any integrators or consultants. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I prefer solutions with lower pricing. I would rate Nasuni's pricing as eight since I consider it to be reasonably priced. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Compared to Nasuni, main competitors are NetApp and EMC Isilon. What other advice do I have? I would recommend Nasuni to other users considering their data requirements. Overall, I would give Nasuni a rating of eight. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Public Cloud If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use? Other Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have worked with Nasuni for three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We can expand file storage capacity on-demand and without limitations. How are customer service and support? 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. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I don't think we use Natsuni for VDI environments. We do have another environment that uses NetApp. How was the initial setup? 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. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Nasuni is cost-effective. If you need something that delivers a lot of value for the cost, Nasuni is a good thing. What other advice do I have? 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. Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We have used Nasuni since 2018. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Nasuni is scalable. We have over 5,000 users. How are customer service and support? I rate Nasuni support eight out of 10. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We previously used Windows File Servers. Nasuni costs more but we obtained some excellent features that we didn't have before. How was the initial setup? 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. What was our ROI? I can't quantify the ROI precisely. It isn't significant, but we've seen some benefits. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Nasuni is cost-effective. It's a relatively affordable solution. We compared it with other products and felt like it was a good price. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We considered a few options, including Panzura, HPE, Amazon, CTERA Edge, and Cohesity. What other advice do I have? 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. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Hybrid Cloud Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? We have used Nasuni for nearly three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I rate Nasuni nine out of 10 for stability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I rate Nasuni 10 out of 10. How are customer service and support? I rate Nasuni support nine out of 10. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? I believe the initial setup was easy. Another team handles deployment, so we're not involved. What other advice do I have? 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. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner

What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have used Nasuni for around 18 months. How are customer service and support? I... Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

What is our primary use case? 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. How has it helped my organization? 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. What is most valuable? 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. What needs improvement? 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. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Nasuni for almost four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? 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. What do I think about the scalability of the 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. How are customer service and support? 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. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? 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. What about the implementation team? 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. What was our ROI? We definitely have a very good ROI. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. Which other solutions did I evaluate? 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. What other advice do I have? I would advise that if a company is similar in size to RRC, Nasuni is defin... Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

What is our primary use case? We are using it as a file share server. The solution is for CIFS and Windows file shares. We have boxes deployed in different environments, including on-prem and, in a few locations, it's in a virtual image. We provide support to our customers and are currently managing more than 200 devices. How has it helped my organization? We use it at the global level and it supports a 360-degree view of the data. It's also easy to deploy. Before, with hardware, it was not possible to deploy things as quickly, but because Nasuni is available in the cloud, as well as via a VDI image, you can deploy it quickly. Another benefit is that our RPO and RTO are very much reduced. If a user has deleted something, we can provide the latest backup. For example, if they deleted something at 11 AM, we have the backup available from 10:55 AM. It also helps eliminate on-premises infrastructure. All the data is stored in the cloud, either in block or S3, and that means you do not need large storage hardware in your data centers. You just need an internet connection to connect with the device. That will save costs on space, air conditioning, and power. And it will reduce your capital cost, with only OpEx contributing to the costs. What is most valuable? The most valuable features are the * replication * snapshots. Nasuni has the capability of taking a snapshot every five minutes. If a user has accidentally deleted their data, we can recover it from the snapshot and provide the latest data to the user. It's a really great feature, one that is not provided by other vendors. The solution is very important for us because of these features, as well as because there is a cloud version, virtual image, and the physical box. It also replaces multiple data toolsets with a single global file system. Also, for provisioning file storage, because Nasuni is a cache device and doesn't store any data—all the data is stored in the cloud—you can provision as much as is needed, spinning up instances as they are required. That means that even if a customer has heavy data requests, we can fulfill them in less than 24 hours. We just spin up the instance, connect it, and it's available for use. And for some users who are accessing data on-premises, we are able to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments. Nasuni also has an embedded feature, an antivirus, which will automatically scan for issues with any file. If a file is infected, it will not be saved on the disk. Access Anywhere is also a great feature, allowing you to access data from your mobile and from your desktop. And suppose a disaster happens. Nasuni's metadata is available within 20 minutes, meaning you can deploy the new instance and map the data, copying the data from the cloud. What needs improvement? The only issue we face with Nasuni is from the performance perspective. Sometimes, when we deploy a Nasuni device, it doesn't meet our requirements. It's a capacity-planning issue. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working on Nasuni since 2018. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's stable. How are customer service and support? Nasuni's support is very good. They provide solutions on a priority basis. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? It's easy to deploy, hardly taking an hour, on average, and requires minimal staff for both the deployment and management. A single person can easily manage it. What was our ROI? When we have migrated all of a customer's data to Nasuni, none have said that they had much ROI from their then-existing solution. Nasuni is a cheaper solution with good ROI compared to other solutions. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Nasuni should provide small-scale licenses, like a 20 TB license. Currently, the smallest is a 30 TB license. Smaller-capacity licenses would be good for some users and help increase Nasuni's sales. Which other solutions did I evaluate? NetApp doesn't have the same features for managing devices, whereas from the Nasuni Management Console, you can manage multiple devices at the same time. The centralized management is a great feature. The only disadvantage of Nasuni is due to the fact that all the data is in the cloud. Other devices, like Panzura, have the data in the cloud as well as local copies. What other advice do I have? If you're concerned about migration to the cloud, you can use Snowball to move the data to the cloud and then you can upload it to Nasuni. There are a lot of options available. I can't think of any features that should be added to Nasuni. It's a good product. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner

What is our primary use case? Nasuni is replacing our old file-sharing system based on StorSimple, a Microsoft appliance that uses server message block technology. SMB enables you to store a range of file types. You can store Office files and various file types that require this technology. They are application-related files that interact with executables, such as INI files, library files, etc. Now, Nasuni is fulfilling StorSimple's role as the multipurpose storage solution for our application-related files. It isn't storing documents like Office 365 files, PDFs, email, VIZIO, etc. We can keep those files in SharePoint. The management console runs on a private cloud, but Nasuni hosts the file servers on an AWS public cloud. We have around 12,000 users, but the active user base is approximately 5,000. Various departments access Nasuni, including HR, finance, legal, and occasionally C-Suite executives. Our insurance and banking operations use it because they have managed and user-developed applications that use Nasuni and require SMB technology. It stores all the files apps need to run. Reports, documents, snapshots, and things like that are also stored in the same place in Nasuni. That's the appropriate use for it, but some users are misusing it. For example, some people are using unified storage instead of SharePoint. How has it helped my organization? We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files. Nasuni has reduced the friction and noise associated with file management because the devices are more reliable. When we were using StorSimple, we had at least two priority-one incidents in which business-critical applications were affected. Those were serious problems, and we were required to notify the regulator. We haven't had any critical failures since we started using Nasuni. Our previous solution was noisy and awful. Now, it's quiet and smooth. We don't hear anything. I don't have precise figures, but the percentage reduction in issues must be huge. Storage was a problem for everyone, from the CIO to the engineers. We don't hear the same complaints. When we get tickets, they're not related to reliability. Our tickets mainly relate to access issues where the end-user doesn't fully understand the self-service or automated components. StorSimple was complex and out of control. Nasuni is relatively simple, so even I can understand it. It's easy to manage, and we're happy with it operationally. Nasuni is adaptable to organizational changes. For example, if we did a merger or acquisition, we could easily add another volume or file-sharing instance. Nasuni could accommodate a rapid expansion or merging of data. I don't think Nasuni would make removing file shares any harder or easier. That comes down to how well the shares are named and whether we can identify who owns them. There's not enough metadata about the organizational unit on the shares to help us, so it would still be a bit of a manual process. We couldn't just say that we're selling off this business unit that owns these, so we need to ready them for migration out of Nasuni to the host of the next organization that's taking over. There's not enough metadata on the shares to tell us. However, we could identify those using a different tool. We could analyze the data and identify the owners. That's no problem. And if we could link those to business units being sold, isolating or tagging those for migration wouldn't be that hard. The continuous file versioning is excellent. We have a refresh cycle of around five minutes. If there were a ransomware attack, we could roll it back to as recent as five minutes ago. We typically wouldn't discover ransomware attacks too quickly, but we have that enabled, and it's handy. Users can also roll back files to a previous version if they know how. Otherwise, they will need to raise a ticket to notify us when a file has been corrupted, or there was an unauthorized change. Nasuni creates lots of versions and works pretty efficiently. It snapshots only the differences, so the storage doesn't get out of control. With continuous file versioning, we don't need to worry about timely backups and restorations. We trust Nasuni to do their full backups in an environment we can control. It's a contracted service-level agreement, so we don't need to test it, and we have no desire to. We have tested the disaster recovery process in a training scenario and will do it in production eventually. That's scheduled for later this year. It will probably be in Q4. I believe the tests we've done in training fairly represent what should happen in production if we need to restore. It has replaced some on-prem infrastructure when discussing hybrid situations involving a private cloud. In this case, we use a private cloud for the management console, and the file storage volumes themselves are sitting on the cloud. Most of the data is not on-prem, but we still have some on-prem infrastructure. It's on-prem because we configure and manage it and control the VM for the management console. I think Nasuni is cheaper to operate than our previous solution. We removed some data and plan to eliminate more, so our overall storage footprint will decrease, but it hasn't yet. We're still working on that. That will reduce costs. We had one person managing StorSimple nearly full-time, and two or three people had to frequently stick their noses in it because of the problems. It only takes half a person to manage Nasuni daily. We spend a little more because we're cleaning up the ownership and improving our technical state compliance monitoring. We're working with Splunk and are getting the Syslog server configured and reporting correctly, so we need a full-time person. Nasuni simplifies infrastructure purchasing and management because we're only responsible for our management console and the Syslog server. We provide that as VMs in our private cloud. The file storage is Nasuni's responsibility, and we pay a subscription fee per terabyte. If we want more terabytes, we ask them. They do the provisioning and expansion and seamlessly match up the volumes. What is most valuable? Nasuni's security is excellent. The data is chopped up and encrypted. Even if someone manages to intercept the encrypted data, they can't make sense of it because of the way it's chopped up. Another thing I like about Nasuni is the way it handles private keys. It's like an escrow service, which I find trustworthy. They allow us to manage the private keys. I would think twice if Nasuni had a service where only they could control the private keys. If they had no escrow service, that would also not be ideal. The sole responsibility for the keys would rest with the customer, who may not always know how to manage those keys. If you lost the key, then too bad. All your data is gone and can't be retrieved. I think they've struck a nice balance by allowing the customer to make that choice. What needs improvement? Nasuni provides enough reporting to see what's happening. You can see the number of shares, total volume, issues, conflicts, etc., but it doesn't provide much visibility from a content perspective. For example, it doesn't tell you the data age. When you're trying to sort and filter information, the data creation date is a critical factor. Nasuni doesn't give you that. You can't get a count of all the file types, like the number of PDFs, Word docs, and PPT files. It lacks some content reporting. Then again, it's doing what it is designed to do. Nasuni provides a management console that lets you do specific functions, and it does those well. However, they haven't tried to include functionality that would be useful to people who want to manage the information at a global level. We have to use another tool for that, but it isn't expensive. We run scripts that take a month or more to complete because we have a lot of data. It's taking us a long time to get more detailed information on what is in there. It would be handy if Nasuni offered built-in features for reporting on data ages and file types. For how long have I used the solution? Nasuni went into production in the fall of 2022. I became the product owner this month, but I have been training on it since February. How are customer service and support? I rate Nasuni's support a nine out of ten. I don't have regular contact with support. My engineers deal with them. I haven't heard any complaints, which is a good thing. If they were getting anything other than prompt, accurate answers, I would hear about it. The lady who provided the training was excellent. She used to provide advanced tech support but has since shifted to a customer success and training role. She's completely reliable. We know her and like her. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? I wasn't involved in the deployment, but I believe Nasuni was relatively straightforward to deploy. At the same time, there is a lot to learn, and you need to do a lot of configuration. Based on my experience in training, I know there are probably a hundred configuration decisions to make because you have various options. I don't think it was complicated or too difficult to understand. The deployment required four employees who were involved for several months. You need an architect and some integration people who know how it works with the licensing, provisioning, and automation of the design. After deployment, you only need one full-time person to maintain and administer the platform. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? T... Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.