Technology

Nasuni’s Data Continuity Services comprise an entire storage solution, but the core of our technology is our next-generation storage controller, the Nasuni Filer, which brings the cloud into your data center and is your single point of control for the system. 

The Nasuni Filer in many ways resembles and functions like a traditional storage controller. It’s an on-premises storage device supporting NFS and CIFS, and is fully integrated with Active Directory, DFS and Windows Previous Versions. It has a high-performance cache and takes snapshots that allow for file-level restores. It’s available as a virtual or physical appliance. Its reach and capacity far exceed those of a traditional controller, however, because instead of using only memory and local disk to manage its data, it has the entire capacity of the cloud at its disposal. 

As a next-generation storage controller, one of the Filer’s most critical jobs is to ensure that a gold copy of your data and all its versions are periodically sent to the cloud, and that the data residing in your office for current use is in the form of copies. The Filer’s advanced, cloud-specific snapshot technology achieves just that. The Filer’s other most critical job is to encrypt the data with OpenPGP AES-256 at the edge, so the data can never be breached without your encryption keys (which we encourage you to hold in a secure offsite location). With the technology in place to assure that your data in the cloud is both fully versioned and secure, many exciting new features become possible:

• Resource Reclamation and the End of Backup
  Due to the architecture of the cloud—where data is held in multiple copies in multiple servers and data centers—all data stored in the cloud is automatically protected, so backup is not necessary. This frees up data-center infrastructure and IT resources and eliminates headaches. The data can be also be restored by the users themselves, instantly, a boon for IT time management.

• Global Access
  Easy and secure global access to company data becomes a reality. Nasuni has established strong security protocols that allow IT to safely authorize remote secondary Filers to access the company’s data in the cloud. All version changes are consolidated in the cloud, resulting in a single, consistent timeline for all snapshots, regardless of their Filer of origin. IT can also determine what read/write privileges remote offices will have for what data. Local storage for your Filers can be tailored to the varying needs of your offices, as can the decision to use a virtual rather than a hardware appliance (they are interchangeable and work in concert for a hybrid approach). The flexibility of being able to access a huge quantity of data with a small-footprint infrastructure can’t be stressed enough. Remote offices may run lean, but they don’t have to be data starved.

• Disaster Recovery
  Because the Nasuni Filer is just a point of control for your data and can be up and running in 15 minutes, reestablishing access to your Nasuni data after a disaster—or a hardware failure—is simple and fast. Just power up a new Filer, upload your encryption keys and you’re back in business. 

Under the hood in the Nasuni Filer is our ‘magic’ UniFS™ – the file system developed specifically for the Filer. UniFS™ is the inherent intelligence that allows Nasuni to create a fully versioned file system accessible from anywhere.

Additional features: The Nasuni Filer also enables automatic data migration, secure and controlled data deletion, non-disruptive software upgrades, and proactive monitoring with phone-home features. It requires little training and runs in lights-out mode for simple maintenance. 

Nasuni Benefits:

• Small-footprint solution
• Fully versioned file system
• Anywhere access
• Strong AES-256 encryption
• Easy, fast setup
• Replaceable without disruption
• Single-point access control
• Data retention policies
• Data migration service
• Quality of Service (QoS) network settings
• Proactive monitoring and customer support

Sending data to the cloud is easy, bringing the benefits of the cloud into your data center at the enterprise level is hard – we do that.

Cloud storage provides an unlimited and reliable data repository built on the principle that data can be fully protected if it's held redundantly, with copies being distributed widely among a network of servers. Cloud data centers are massive, providing an economy of scale and level of reliability unattainable by traditional storage solutions. By themselves, these cloud data centers are 'raw' and provide little function to enterprise IT storage. They are equivalent, in the old model of storage, to hard drives in a storage array. The Nasuni Filer, our next-generation storage controller, is the critical component that makes the cloud usable for everyday storage needs.

Like raw hardware drives, cloud storage must be tested before being selected for enterprise-class storage solutions. At Nasuni, we have spent over two years evaluating a multitude of cloud storage providers and continue to monitor them constantly. Only the providers that pass the most rigorous tests for reliability and performance are selected as a component of Nasuni’s Data Continuity Services. We’ve developed a comprehensive bench test that provides us with rigorous metrics by which to judge the quality of the different clouds. For an extra level of disaster protection, we also make clouds that hold data in multiple geographies available to our customers.

Nasuni Benefits: 

• Highly scalable architecture engineered for growth
• Highly redundant for strong protection
• Single-timeline, fully versioned file system
• Accessible from any office location