The Donut Solution: Nasuni’s New UI

We heard you. Several customers have come back to us with comments on our initial User Interface—particularly the cache status widget. This graphic, created by a customer, sums it up:

We all get what this image means, right? Well, that same intuitive understanding is what we’re going for with our user interface in general – and the specific improvements in the new release. Still, we thought we’d explain some of the changes, along with our rationale.

The point of the cache status “widget” is to give you a quick sense of how much space you have in your cache and whether any of that data needs to be pushed to the cloud. A few people here suggested we opt for a pie chart, maybe even a 3D version. But we shot that down fairly quickly. Pie charts are evil.

So we give you what we’ve lovingly dubbed the donut—a gauge or meter within the dashboard that quickly shows you just how much space you have in your local cache. You can also clearly see how much of your data the Filer has stored in the cloud with the new “badge” we’ve added at the top-right.

We’ve added a few explanations, too. Click on the question mark and you’ll be able to read brief descriptions of the differences between dirty and clean data, and what we think of as free space.

If you were to sit and refresh the dashboard, you’d see changes in the cache status—dirty data, or files that haven’t been pushed to the cloud, would appear in red, then disappear as the Filer pushes the encrypted data. The amount of free space would alternately shrink and grow.

But to be perfectly honest, we hope you don’t watch it. You don’t need to. The cache is self-optimizing—more on that here—so it pushes data to the cloud before it fills up. We designed the Nasuni Filer to be low maintenance—in our view, you’ll probably only need to load up the UI every few months. When you do take a look, though, let us know what you think of the donut.

We take comments from all of our Beta customers very seriously – these opinions and thoughts are helping us shape the product, and forcing us to think harder about the decisions we’ve already made. We encourage you to send any feedback you have - user interface or not – to feedback@nasuni.com.

We’re listening.