Nasuni leverages the resources of the cloud to deliver unlimited file storage with built-in file protection, radically simplifying file storage and protection for business.
Two Massive IT Problems, One Ingenious Solution
We believe that the cloud is the future of both file storage and protection. Mega storage systems have huge advantages of scale over private data centers, and the redundancy of their architecture provides protection for files without the opacity and hassles of tape. When several mega clouds recently became available to developers and the public, our only question was, how we can deliver all that potential to business with the least upheaval and the most added value?
The clear advantages of the cloud were easy—storage capacity would be unlimited, files would be protected with redundancy, IT managers would no longer have to buy or maintain hardware, and because the files would be stored offsite, they’d be safe in a disaster.
But for storing files offsite to be a practical solution, you’d have to be able to access your working set at local speeds. The redundant protection of the cloud would only be truly useful to the active life of your data center if the protected files in the cloud were kept up-to-date and restores were easy and fast. And any solution would have to preserve everything that NAS still does best.
And so we developed the Nasuni Filer, a NAS-like downloadable virtual file server that stores all your files with the cloud provider of your choice, while keeping copies of your working set cached to your local storage infrastructure, where they can be accessed as quickly as any local file. Snapshots capture the entire system frequently and send the changes to the cloud. You can easily view and restore any past version of a file, directory or file system, and, during a recovery, high-priority files are available for use immediately. The Nasuni Filer looks much like a NAS, and uses familiar protocols for serving out files, so the transition between your current file environment and a cloud-provisioned one is smooth.
Our Cloud Storage Partners
We do not hold customer files. Instead, we secure customer files with end-to-end encryption and pass them on to trusted cloud providers. Our storage providers are well-known clouds that have passed our rigorous tests for access and reliability, and are on solid footing as businesses. Because no business, however established a monolith, can fully forecast its future, we’ve built a hedge into the system. With Nasuni, there is no vendor lock-in. Your files—and the metadata tracking their histories—are completely portable, so you can remove your files from either us or your provider at any time.
We subject our providers to ongoing performance tests, and our engineering team has developed an automated alert system to flag potential issues. We expect a high level of performance and if it dips below that level, we know immediately, and we work directly with our providers to resolve the issue before it can affect our customers.
Our partners benefit as much as you do from our tough love: We bring more customers to the cloud by making it supremely accessible and useful to business, and by building confidence in the reliability of cloud storage, a solution that is still new to many business customers.
The Story of the Founding Team
Nasuni’s founders, Andres Rodriguez and Robert Mason, are storage veterans with a lifelong passion for data preservation and access. Andres, our CEO, became taken with the dual problem of preservation and access when he was CTO of the New York Times in the late 90s. How could the newspaper’s vast archive be digitally preserved and yet remain accessible for research or online discussions? This led him to found Archivas, a massive enterprise-class cloud storage system in which fixed-content files are redundantly protected, archived, and searchable. As soon as that problem was solved, Andres was on to the next one: How can you do the same thing for files that are not fixed, and extend the benefits of the cloud to business?
President and co-founder Rob Mason, for his part, has twenty years of hard-core storage experience. As a member of the elite Symmetrix team at EMC, Rob developed and implemented numerous caching and RAID algorithms that analyzed and improved the speed and reliability of EMC’s flagship enterprise storage disk array. At I/O Integrity, a company he founded—and where he first caught the attention of Andres—he built a device that was a pure performance optimizer, a cache that sat between a traditional slow disk array and a file server, and sped up the server’s access to storage blocks by five fold. After joining Andres at Archivas as VP of engineering and leading the team to a triumphant success in its acquisition by Hitachi, Rob naturally thought of using his caching expertise to leverage the power of the product he and Andres had just brought into the world.
Andres and Rob incorporated Nasuni in April 2009. They recruited an engineering team of crack developers and architects, with deep expertise in file systems, caching and security. Mindful of the security risk of holding files offsite, they hired an encryption expert who was part of the select working group that in 2007 proposed the OpenPGP standard, now the most widely used security framework on the internet.
To solve the core problems, the team hammered out a patented design for incorporating file changes into a fixed-content storage system without file proliferation, and developed the cache that provides the high-performance link between your office and the cloud.
And with that, the Nasuni solution came to life.
Our Commitment to Excellence
A band of devoted perfectionists, we are obsessive about the quality of our product. Our extensive lab runs round-the-clock tests, pushing and analyzing the performance of our Filer. The Nasuni engineers are so unwilling to suffer imperfection, their first release is a beta in name only: When their software goes out in the world, it’s ready to do the job.
We are committed to solving the problems of storage and protection for you. If there is anything we can change about Nasuni to make it work better for you, we would welcome the feedback. Please contact us at feedback@nasuni.com.