Archive for: All Posts
Follow us with RSSSept. 2, 2010
Beyond the Allure of 3PAR - How Massive Data Growth is Transforming the Storage Industry
Almost a decade ago I ran into the 3PAR team at a trade show. I was there with my previous company, Archivas. We were showcasing the capabilities of our brand new object-store: the Archivas Storage Cluster. Based on the same distributed computing principles that had allowed companies like Amazon and Akamai to scale to petabytes, our system ran on inexpensive commodity hardware — Intel-compatible servers interconnected with plain Ethernet. The object-store was a pure software concept that still managed to scale gracefully from a terabyte to petabytes by self-organizing into larger and larger clusters. The 3PAR team was demonstrating their T Series InServ Storage Server, an impressive rack of controllers that looked like it could crush a software guy by just blinking. It was hardware. It was the old world of hard drives, blocks and LUN reservations. It seemed to me ludicrous to compete with EMC in mid-range storage arrays where CLARiiON ruled supreme. Boy, was I wrong. I was approximately $2 billion wrong.
Aug. 31, 2010
Disaster Recovery Planning and the Nasuni Hurricane Giveaway
Hurricanes sweeping through the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean have already begun to capture headlines. Swimmers and surfers are at risk due to huge waves, but these massive storms pose a significant threat to businesses too. Once they move inland, hurricanes can damage or even destroy offices and company data centers, and potentially cost enterprises tens of thousands of dollars or more. Disaster recovery planning is critical for any enterprise, but for companies in hurricane-vulnerable areas, this is especially true right now. That’s why we have decided to offer the free use of our cloud gateway technology, the Nasuni Filer, to companies in hurricane-prone regions for the duration of the storm season.
Aug. 27, 2010
Off-site data backup
Off-site data backup is a hot-topic for good reason. Traditional off-site data backup methods are aged. They are slowly being retired by advances in cloud computing and WAN optimization. This transition isn't without debate, with the tried-and-true methods bumping up against the newcomers - particularly vendors that sell off-site services. On the one hand, there is the traditional pick-up-tape / store-tape / return-tape method. Small companies do this via sneakernet and trunkware and big companies hire large retention companies. On the other hand, we have increasing amounts of bandwidth, data deduplication, and improvements in the security of data transfer between two separate points on the Internet. In the end, the advantages of an automated data recovery plan that does not rely on tapes is easy to verify and test and is just as secure (if not moreso).
Aug. 24, 2010
The Road To Release – Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Azure
In this installment of our road to release series, I’m really proud to be able to unveil the next two features. We want the Filer to simply “work” for different virtualization platforms and we want customers to be able to choose from a range of cloud storage providers. It’s important that we support as many of these as we can, while still ensuring their quality.
Aug. 23, 2010
Strategies for offsite data protection: using snapshots to merge backup and archive in the cloud
People are far more familiar with cloud storage than they think. Hundreds of millions of people regularly store their photos and videos in the cloud. Everytime someone posts a picture to Facebook, Flickr, or any social-networking or photo-sharing site, that photo is stored and protected in the cloud. The file is safely archived. This is a great use case for cloud storage - for reasons I'll detail below - but the cloud can be more than an archive. A snapshot-based cloud gateway can take advantage of the protection model of the cloud to transform its functionality for business.
Aug. 18, 2010
The Road to Release – Taking Control of the Cloud (Credentials)
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.
Aug. 16, 2010
Online Backup Solutions and Cloud Storage Gateways: How Do They Compare?
We’ve dedicated a few posts recently to different disaster recovery solutions, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tape, disk or some combination of disk and tape are the most common solutions when it comes to disaster recovery planning, but there are significant downsides to each. One option we haven’t discussed yet in detail, online backup, meets several of the main criteria for effective disaster recovery planning. Online backup is, in a way, the predecessor to the cloud storage gateway. The question is: How do they compare?
Aug. 12, 2010
The Road to Release – Taking Control of your Cloud Storage Bandwidth
Continuing with my new release preview series, I thought it would be good to move to all the network-related improvements we’ve added. Much like the UI changes and the Windows integration enhancements, we’ve left no stone unturned (much to the chagrin of our QA team).
Aug. 12, 2010
Disaster Recovery Planning: Is Your Business Doing Enough?
Hurricane season has arrived. Homeowners near the coasts are undoubtedly getting ready to board up their windows and prepare for violent winds and rains, and businesses should be considering the unthinkable too. Losing access to critical data can be crippling for enterprises - in some cases it costs $18,000 per hour. Granted, data center disasters are often far more mundane. Instead of a hurricane, a water pipe might break in the building, or critical software may become corrupted. When it comes to disaster recovery planning, is your business doing enough?
Aug. 10, 2010
Cloud Storage Webinar to Explore Pros and Cons of Leading Disaster Recovery Models
Effective disaster recovery planning is critical for businesses - catastrophic data loss can be crippling. Only 6% of companies that experience major disasters survive, and 51% close up shop within two years, according to researchers at the University of Texas*. Disaster recovery planning is hardly a new concept, but the apparently tried and tested methods do have significant flaws. This Thursday at 12:00 PM EDT, our CEO, storage industry veteran Andres Rodriguez, will be hosting a webinar to explore the pros and cons of the leading disaster recovery models. Andres will help participants understand the disaster recovery tools out there today, and show you how to protect your mission-critical data from potential catastrophes.
Aug. 7, 2010
The Road to Release – Windows Integration Updates
One of the core benefits of the Filer is its tight integration with the Microsoft Windows platform. This is not due to any Windows “bias” on the part of our company or team. It's a business reality: Most enterprises run Windows. Apple OSX and Linux are both steadily gaining ground, but you have to have good, solid integration with Windows to succeed in the marketplace.
This is why we offered such good integration in our first version: for security we fully supported Active Directory (and its ACLs), share creation, etc. We spend most of our time testing and proving the product in Windows, so we have been confident in our level of support.
Aug. 6, 2010
Simple, Secure Backup and Disaster Recovery Through Cloud Storage
Earlier this week we released our list of five key considerations for disaster planning, highlighting the point that the right cloud storage gateway can deliver where traditional storage falls short. The Nasuni Filer in particular enables fast, reliable, simple, cost-effective, and secure disaster recovery. Many of our customers have signed on with Nasuni because of the backup and DR benefits, and we're going to use this post to demonstrate just how simple it can be, starting with the initial backup process and then jumping ahead to the aftermath of a disaster.
Aug. 3, 2010
The Road to Release – A Refreshed UI
After the introduction last week, I had a hard time picking a feature (or group of features) coming in the next big release that I wanted to show off. There's a lot to come.
That said, I figured I'd start with what I know best: the Filer User Interface. In my previous post, I introduced some of the changes and enhancements we've made. But in this post, I'll go a bit deeper into the changes, and some of the reasons why we implemented them. One of the important things to note, though, is that most - if not all - of these changes were driven by user and customer feedback. Sure, some of the small visual touches were courtesy of the UI team, but the bulk of the functional-type changes came from your feedback.
Aug. 3, 2010
Disaster Recovery Planning for Business Data: Top 5 considerations
Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is a major concern for any enterprise. There's always a chance that your business data could be lost due to corrupted software, a hardware failure, human error, or even an actual natural disaster like a hurricane or a flood taking out a data center. So how do you plan to recover? Our storage experts at Nasuni have just released a list of the top five factors any enterprise should evaluate when choosing a strategy - downtime, data integrity, cost, simplicity, and security. We thought we'd sum up the analysis briefly here.
Aug. 2, 2010
The Government Trusts the Cloud – Why Don’t You?
Last week Google announced that it received an important security clearance from the U.S. government. This stamp, the Federal Information Security Management Act certification, means that Google can now start selling its cloud computing applications to government agencies, and potentially challenge Microsoft’s dominance in that market. But the news is also important for the cloud. In effect, it means the U.S. government trusts the cloud. This, in turn, further validates our point that with the right system, the cloud can be safe and secure.
July 29, 2010
The Road to Release – Feature Previews
Here at Nasuni, we’re always adapting and thinking about how we can make our product better. Customer feedback is enormously helpful on this front – every time someone calls tech support, or speaks to a sales representative, we’re parsing that feedback and bringing it back to the engineering group to see what we can do to improve our product and the service we offer.
July 28, 2010
Cloud Storage Security Challenge: Disaster Recovery
A week ago, our first cloud storage challenge officially came to a close and we were happy, but far from surprised, to announce that nobody won the challenge. We then proved that we didn't game the system and revealed the prize file.
July 26, 2010
Cloud Storage Security Challenge: Technical Unveiling
Last Wednesday, our first cloud storage challenge officially ended with an unsurprising result: nobody won the challenge. In this post we'll provide proof that the data was actually online for the challenge and that we didn't game the system. In short, we're going to prove that this was an honest unwinnable challenge.
July 22, 2010
Looking at OpenStack, a Rackspace and NASA Initiative
In case you missed it, there was pretty big news this week coming out of Rackspace - one of our supported cloud storage partners - and NASA. They announced the release and open-sourcing of their cloud backend, now named "OpenStack".
July 21, 2010
Cloud Storage Security Challenge: The Free Software Foundation Wins
Today our first cloud storage challenge officially comes to an end. We're thrilled - but not surprised - to say that no one cracked the Nasuni Filer and revealed the contents of the encrypted prize file, which we left out for anyone to attack. As such, this security challenge successfully demonstrated that modern encryption can protect cloud storage files.