Archive for: 2010/05
Follow us with RSSMay 28, 2010
Thanks to Django
We’re going to take a break from banging on the cloud storage drum and offer an appreciative hat-tip to Django. Not the legendary Gypsy guitar player – although he was pretty good – but the Python-based web framework.
May 25, 2010
Storage as a Service is Here
Since we officially launched the Nasuni Filer, we’ve spent some time in this blog explaining the technology and talking about how some of our first customers are using it. For each of these customers, we are delivering storage as a service. We’re not shipping an array of disks or even a small piece of hardware. The Filer delivers a service, and we have been focused from the start on making that experience clear, transparent, and simple.
May 24, 2010
What Amazon’s RRS Really Means
Amazon announced its Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) tier last week and storage blogs blew up with the news, touting the drop in pricing as a major development. The new tier reduces the cost of storing objects in the cloud from 15 cents per GB to 10 cents per GB and below.
May 21, 2010
Questions About the Google Cloud
The big news this week: Google announced its first cloud storage offering, Google Storage for Developers. We’re very happy to see another large vendor join the space, especially a giant like Google. At the same time, there’s reason to be cautious here.
May 19, 2010
Customer Story: Simple, Secure Backup
The full version of the Filer has only been out for a month, but we are already seeing a wide range of use cases. Last week, we discussed a consulting firm that plans to use the Filer to quickly and inexpensively set up secure, high-performance offices in remote locations. We are also seeing plenty of interest from schools and universities.
May 17, 2010
Four Cloud Security Must-Haves
A group at Microsoft Research just released a paper describing a new storage system designed to address the security issues associated with the cloud. They point to the fact that none of the cloud providers offer security guarantees in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as a major obstacle to wider use of the cloud; you can read about their proposed solution, a system called CloudProof, here. What caught our attention in particular was the group’s list of the four desirable security properties for cloud storage:
May 14, 2010
Customer Story: Office-in-a-Box
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.
May 12, 2010
Storage News
We’ve noted before that experts are forecasting 2010 as the year that cloud storage truly arrives, and the industry certainly is growing, as yet another cloud storage option recently went live - the SaaS company OpSource added a pay-as-you-go service. Last week we also picked up a benchmark of another sort: Cloud storage was mentioned in renowned Wall Street Journal writer Walter Mossberg’s Personal Technology column. Granted, it only earned a paragraph in the piece, which explains cloud computing for a general audience, but we took particular interest in his note on security.
May 10, 2010
Keeping Virtual Machines Streamlined
Here at Nasuni, we are all for virtualization. The move away from physical hardware to virtual hardware, or the consolidation of boxes into virtual machines, gives you an enormous amount of flexibility in your data center and ends up consuming far less power and space. It’s obvious why virtualization is so popular right now. Of course, we are also deploying a virtual machine ourselves, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we support this larger technology flow.
May 5, 2010
Simple and Scalable: A Customer Case Study
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.
May 3, 2010
Nasuni Billing: Clear and Simple
We designed the Filer to be easy to use, from the simple-to-understand User Interface to automatic encryption. But we have also made an effort to extend this principle to the entire Nasuni experience, even the billing and payment process.