Today we’re introducing another customer case study. In this example, we will focus on a small software development firm with roughly 20 employees. The company is moving quickly, generating a lot of data from different departments and a wide range of data types and sizes. Small Microsoft Word documents, presentations, multi-gigabyte machine images, fancy videos and more.
As you’d expect, data is important to them, but like many small companies, they were running into some difficulties early on. They found it hard to adequately provision and protect their data, and management was a real challenge.
The company started with a simple, server-based NAS with internal storage. Initially, they simply created shares for users with little internal security, but later, as the company grew, they upgraded to Active Directory authentication. They were using off-the-shelf backup software to do incremental backups to disk. At night they would compress all this data and transfer the differences offsite to an employee’s basement for a form of disaster recovery protection.
All of this worked. Sort of.
The server providing their NAS was running out of space. They had to take time to add space and migrate the data. This was not the end of the world, of course, but it was work.
The backup software had to be maintained, monitored, required updates—generally it just wasn’t maintenance free. The few times they did need to restore a file through the backup system, the file was either not in the most recent daily backup (having been created earlier in the same day) or the system took too long to crunch through everything to recover that one small, accidentally deleted file. And that disaster recovery approach? They knew it was just a hack. It worked most of the time but had many error-recovery-related issues since it was quickly put together and was not a real, tested product.
In short, the company was wasting valuable time maintaining a homegrown system with marginal results.
Then they opted to use the first version of the Nasuni Filer, the GA Filer. They set up a job to copy all the data from their existing file server to the Filer over a single weekend. At the end of the weekend, they deployed the Nasuni Filer.
The results? They are enjoying the same features and benefits as any of our customers:
- Unlimited capacity supporting an unlimited number of clients that we don’t have to manage
- Hourly backups of our data
- A simple interface to quickly recover lost files and folders
- Built-in disaster recovery support provided by a name brand company with our data protected and distributed in professional grade data centers far from our own offices
Additionally, they receive notifications of software updates to the Filer that cover their NAS, Backup and DR solutions with one update.
Does this sound like a company you know? In fact, this is our own story. Like so many small companies today, we had a problem with unstructured data growth. It just so happens that we were also designing and building the solution at the same time.
Now, a little bit more about our experience. Our manual and automated systems demonstrate our strong focus on quality—we’ve written patents in this area in the past. But we also believe in eating our own dog food. There is nothing like real use to prove a system.
The GA Filer obviously wasn’t our first experience with the system. Less than six months after Nasuni started, we created our first Filer for shared use within the company, appropriately named Dogfood. We beat on that system, stressed it, poked at it. We grew with it over the next six months in parallel with our alpha, beta and QA testing. When the filer went GA, we moved from using someone else’s NAS and our crazy backup approaches to using a Filer for production use.
We have since switched the name of the production Filer to “Kin,” the Japanese word for gold. The Filer is saving us time and money and, as such, we think it is worth its (virtual) weight in gold. Dogfood lives on, but is now running Filer 2.0 features and functionality.
Have your own story? Contact us at feedback@nasuni.com.