Storage as a Service, is it SaaS?
I was recently reading a Blog posting titled “SaaS Makes Good Sense, Even in a Recession” by a group called Montclair Advisors. It struck me how the SaaS value propositions they had compiled could specifically all be applied to purchasing Storage as a Service, and in particular the Nasuni service.
The SaaS value propositions they identified were as follows:
Customer Stories: What Happens when Clouds Go out of Business?
Early last year the nascent cloud storage industry was rocked when Iron Mountain pulled out of the market. At the time there were just a few public providers and Iron Mountain was one of the early entrants and marquee names. Despite the unfortunate turn of events for Iron Mountain’s digital division (later bought by Autonomy), the team at Iron Mountain did a good job of notifying the users and partners like us of the impending shut down and worked hard to keep the system alive and functional until the announced end-of-life date for their service (May 31st, 2011).
For Nasuni, this was pretty early in our entrance into the market and we had…
Nondisruptive Cloud-to-Cloud Migration - Part 2
In part 1 of this series I outlined the considerations and process required to perform nondisruptive upgrades and migration. In part 2 I describe our most challenging customer case study: direct cloud-to-cloud bulk migration of data between two providers and changes to the protection level of data within a provider. Both cases involved moving large volumes of data outside the customer’s infrastructure and without any disruption to the end-users.
Process in action
Let’s take a look at the entire process for one of our customers that upgraded. This customer had three filers on three different accounts. They had a number of volumes on…
Amazon AWS Storage Gateway
What It is and What It Isn’t Yesterday Amazon introduced the AWS Storage Gateway. This move further legitimizes the general approach to provide infrastructure as a service. Cloud storage is an essential component in providing storage services to business and we should expect that Amazon, being the 800 lbs. cloud, will try to make it as easy as possible to bring data into their cloud. In order to gauge the impact of this new offering to the emerging market of enterprise storage services, it is helpful to look at the established ecosystem between the traditional enterprise storage vendors and the hard drive manufacturers.
The strength of…
Nondisruptive Cloud-to-Cloud Migration
Storage services have the potential to spare customers from the hassle and risks associated with bulk data migration. Enterprise customers demand nondisruptive upgrades to their infrastructure. Traditional storage puts the burden of migration on customers and their physical infrastructure. Storage services shift the stewardship of data to the service provider. This includes software upgrades or something as dramatic as a total replacement of the backend storage. In the first of this two-part series, I lay out the considerations and process for performing nondisruptive migrations. Part 2 in the series puts the process through its…
Nasuni, Across the Globe
We are thrilled to announce that as of January 2012, we have customers spanning 25 countries. From the United States to Australia, our customers are moving terabytes of data – securely – across all their locations.
Nasuni is now being used to store, protect & share data in 25 countries!
Since the addition of multi-site access, our customers have been creating global shares across their entire enterprise, without the need for DFSR, WAN optimization or VPNs. This (secure) liberation of data illustrates what is possible when you put the cloud inside the storage controller.
Here are a few examples of how our customers are using…
DR Solutions: Recovering from a True Disaster
Early in 2011 we had our first production disaster recovery event. We had thoroughly tested the Filer’s DR capabilities countless times on our own, and George Crump of Storage Switzerland has analyzed it and reported on his experience. More importantly, many of our customers put it to the test before buying the Filer. But we never really wanted it to be used in a real-world situation. Why? Because it's there to solve the pain after a disaster. And we wouldn’t wish a disaster on any of our customers. But then it happened and the Filer eased this company’s recovery from a true disaster.
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes, from…5 Storage Predictions for 2012
2011 was quite a year for the storage industry. From the billion dollar acquisitions to the disruptive flooding in Thailand, it was a year to remember. As we look forward, here are 5 storage predictions for the new year.
1. Users continue to generate piles of unstructured data
Back in 2009, Gartner estimated that data growth would happen at a rate of 650% over the next 5 years with 80% of this growth coming from unstructured data. We can get lost in the weeds with facts and figures but most IT managers I’ve spoken with have all said the same thing: their users are storing more and deleting less. The cloud will play an important role in…
Goodbye, Raw Storage
Storage services are putting an end to the complexity of storage pricing
The storage you buy should be the storage you use. Imagine the simplicity of paying a price based not on raw storage guestimates but on the storage capacity your organization is actually using, and included in that price is everything you need to deliver and protect that storage. A single, easy-to-assess price like this is only possible when every function needed to store and protect data is delivered in a single system. Storage services do just that, radically simplifying our IT systems and how we budget for storage.
Buying traditional raw storage is not unlike buying…
Archive vs. “Archive-ish” Data
Ask anyone in IT to define “archive data” and chances are it would go something like this: “Data that is no longer active, but still needs to be kept around for future reference or regulatory compliance.” You may also get an expletive or two thrown in for good measure. In many organizations, archive data is just that, inactive data – though archive data could include recently active data and data that is 5 years old. When it comes of age, this data is generally moved off to tape or to a slower, out of the network storage array. Should anyone need to gain access to it, a request would be made to IT and they would then bring the data back to the active…
