Some of the best features of the Filer are possible because we have established strong relationships with the cloud storage providers we support. When customers select a cloud storage provider (CSP), we automatically provide the needed credentials. In addition to the simplicity (you do not need to establish relationships with the cloud storage providers) this gives us the ability to provide an incredibly simple bill from a single company – Nasuni.
Our bills only include the Nasuni Filer charges and the charges for storage at your chosen CSPs at their current rate. What you will not see on bills from us are all the extra fees the CSPs add like bandwidth fees, per transaction costs, etc because Nasuni has included all those charges in the Filer fee. It’s a win for customers, simple, secure and we pay for fees incurred beyond the storage amount.
All of this has been supported since day one – from the first day of your trial to the point at which you become a loyal Nasuni customer.
Despite the simplicity, however, users have also been requesting the ability to provide their own credentials. For some users, this level of control over the cloud provider account is required. Others might have a preexisting relationship with a cloud provider or another vendor that they wish to leverage.
This is why I’m pleased to unveil support for bringing your own cloud credentials. This support will be released with the other features I’ve written about, and more, when we push the service update at the end of summer.
From an implementation perspective, the ability to provide your own cloud credentials starts in the first-time setup wizard:
Here, we see that the one-time setup wizard will now provide users the option – at install time – to provide a set of their own credentials. The actual form where you input the data is also simple:
The credentials you provide in this phase will be used for your initial cloud volume – something a lot of users have expressed interest in.
Moving on, there’s a new section in the UI called “Cloud Credentials” under the configuration tab:
Here, you can see a complete inventory of all of the credentials you have uploaded, and what they are used by. You can also edit existing credentials, add new ones, or delete sets using this page.
Once you’ve uploaded credentials, you can associate them with the volume you’re creating:
And, of course, you can see what credentials are associated with the volume when editing the volume itself:
There are some other interesting aspects as well. You can change cloud credentials after you’ve uploaded them (however we test edits to make sure the Filer can still access your data in the cloud). And all credentials are stored locally, but they are encrypted and backed up with the rest of your configuration for speedy disaster recovery.
At no point does Nasuni have direct access to your credentials. Nor do we want it. At the point at which you are providing your own credentials we treat them as if they are akin to your encryption keys: They are your property.
When the update ships at the end of the summer; customers will be able to supply their own credentials for all supported cloud providers, including Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files and Nirvanix SDN. Obviously, this also sets the stage for our long-term support of – you guessed it – private clouds.
This is easily one of the biggest changes we’ve made to the product since we released earlier this year, and it was completely driven by feedback from you, our users and customers. We appreciate all of the feedback, and again – we’re listening.
If you have feedback or questions, please email us – feedback@nasuni.com - or sound off in the comments.
If you’re excited about these features – why wait to start using the Filer, if you sign up today you’ll get immediate access to all of the features discussed in this series the second we release. Sign up today and use the coupon code “Summer 2010” when subscribing, and you’ll get 10% seasonal discount off the subscription price!
Other posts in this series: