Anytime you deploy an innovative product, you are probably going to be surprised by how certain customers or companies decide to use it. We are experiencing that now with the Nasuni Filer. One of our favorite use cases thus far is a consulting firm with a number of remote offices.
From the start, they were asking us questions about applications for our technology that we hadn’t considered. This company is frequently setting up small, nimble branch offices, either on a client site or in other locations. They have to do it quickly, and they often need to be able to tear the office down again when a given project is finished. Clearly, a firm in this position wouldn’t want to set up a data center every time they established a new branch. They’d have to accurately forecast their compute and storage needs to ensure they had the necessary capacity in place, then set up a mirror array to guard against disasters. That is a lot of work for a temporary, remote office.
What they were looking for instead was a standardized box that contained all the necessary infrastructure, but would also allow them to grow, and recover their data in the event of a disaster. Ideally, they’d be able to dispatch this box - which would have the file server, print server, domain controller, etc. – to the stand-up office and put it in play immediately. This way, their employees wouldn’t have to deal with the long latencies associated with doing all their work over the wire, but the IT team wouldn’t have to get involved with the complexities of setting up a local data center.
So, they came to us and asked if the Filer would be suited for this scenario. The short answer: Absolutely. Nasuni’s virtual appliance can deliver nearly unlimited storage capacity and local-like performance. Those remote employees enjoy in-office speeds, not Internet-induced delays, yet the Filer also delivers replication and backup, so IT knows that these files will be easily restored in the event of a disaster. Our encryption methods also ensure that files are secure on the wire and in the cloud.
Thanks to the Filer, this client has essentially developed an office-in-a-box. It’s a great application, a wonderful example of what happens when you send your technological baby out into the world, and, to be perfectly honest, we’re disappointed we didn’t think of it first.