Storage Switzerland Test Drives the Filer

We were all pretty excited to see George Crump’s latest Storage Switzerland article, “Nasuni Product Test Drive – Initial Configuration.” Crump and his team will be trying out the Filer over the next few months, so this will be the first in a series of posts on our technology. In this initial piece, he walks through the basic installation and configuration of the Filer. To quote him with pride:

“As you can see from the video below installation was incredibly simple, possibly the simplest NAS installation we have ever performed. Double clicking on the VMX file started the installation process and after providing the IP address, the filer was up and running and has not been down since.”

We’ve spent a lot of time making sure that the entire Filer experience is like this, from installation to Active Directory configuration. Cleanliness and simplicity are critical to us (several of us are full time Mac users, like Crump).

This isn’t the case with the larger storage industry. There’s a long history of complexity in storage products, but from the start we’ve rejected the idea that cloud storage needs to be complex to be effective. Simplicity does not indicate a lack of depth or features. Apple is proof of that.

Crump specifically calls out the Filer’s GUI as being “clean, uncluttered.” Well,  we’re planning to advance the design further with the GUI makeover we’ve done for our 2.0 release of the Filer scheduled for later this year. We’re fans of clean, simple, and usable design - the 1.0 Filer GUI was close, but we knew we could do a lot better. And there’s no point in being in this business unless you’re willing to challenge yourself.

The first big change we made was the home page, which also shows the new look and feel as a whole:

We’ve cleaned up the widgets (previously they were floating) and made the entire home page more compact, while still keeping it clean. If you look at the top of this screen shot, you’ll also note that there’s a tab that reads: “You have 3 messages.” This is the new “sticky message” interface, which allows us to communicate actionable information to you, the user, in an unobtrusive fashion. 

Here is the expanded view:

As you can see, it’s easy to review all your messages and dismiss the ones that are less interesting to you.

We’ve also redone both the volumes information page and the snapshots page. The goal, again, was to make them simpler, cleaner, and easier to use.

With the new interface, search is unobtrusive, and the workflow/relationship between the various elements is a lot more clear for everyone. Finally – and this is by no means an exhaustive list of the features or changes coming with 2.0 – we created new network performance charts. With a snapshot-to-the-cloud file system, we’ve seen that administrators really crave insight into the behavior and performance of the network. Soon we’ll be providing that in clear, graphic, easy-to-read form:

For now this is all we want to reveal of our 2.0 release of the Filer. We weren’t even planning on unveiling this much, but Crump’s article, complete with videos that show just how simple the installation process is, got us excited. We had to share.

There’s a lot more coming for the Filer this summer, and we truly appreciate the feedback we’ve received so far from our users. It has been invaluable, so please keep the comments coming. As we’ve said before, we’re listening.