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.

Before we had even shipped the initial 1.0 version of the Filer just three months ago, we were planning the next major series of features. In fact, we had already designed and started implementing some of those features. In the months since the initial release, we’ve shipped seven individual updates to our customers. Some delivered added features or offered new cloud providers, others provided bug fixes for issues found both internally and externally. Despite these changes, our work on the next major release hasn’t faltered.

We’re incredibly excited about this next release. So excited, in fact, that we can’t resist a few previews. This post is the first in a series that will discuss and showcase the features coming to the Nasuni Filer at the end of the summer. Some posts will discuss a single feature; others might cover a small group of related ones.

This is a bit of a deviation from the normal policies of most companies, especially storage companies. They either tend to be more conservative when discussing features and roadmap items or they spin mighty webs of marketing blather and “forward looking” information without saying exactly what’s coming or when.

Again, we at Nasuni are taking a different approach. This series will discuss features that we will ship, have done, and are currently testing. While we are providing storage as a service, we still cluster large numbers of features into a group targeted at a service release. These features will be released at once and available to all of our users at the same time. Some are big changes – some are small. All of them are for you!

To start things off we’re going to discuss two of the “smaller” improvements we’ve made to the Filer. First, our Quality of Service throttling feature. This gives the administrator control over how much bandwidth the Filer will use to communicate to the cloud at any given time. In the original version, we only supported a single rule, with a limited number of throttle values (in megabits/second).

Multiple customers and trial users expressed that they would like to have the ability to schedule a set of rules instead of a single one. This way, they’d have more granular control over when/how the Filer was throttled. In this update, we’re going to support a maximum of four non-overlapping rules, controlled by the user. This means that you can easily tell the Filer to throttle at specific times during the day/week, optimizing your network utilization as needed:

Additionally, customers requested additional values in the drop-down for the throttle level. Forgive us; we had underestimated the size of the network pipes customers had!

The second, smaller improvement is that users will be able to schedule automatic updates of the software. Yes, it’s a small change, but it allows administrators to dictate exactly what day and time any updates to the Filer would be automatically applied. Previously, administrators had to log in to the UI and choose to install the new updates. Check out the screenshot below:

That’s it for this introduction. If you have any thoughts or questions, please send us an email at feedback@nasuni.com or sound off in the comments.

The new release is coming soon, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t start using the Filer now. You’ll get immediate access to all of the features discussed in this series the second we release. Plus, if you sign up today and use the coupon code “Summer 2010” when subscribing, you’ll receive a 10% seasonal discount off the subscription price!