Nasuni Offers Free Use of Gateway to the Cloud for Companies Vulnerable to Hurricane Disaster

NATICK, Mass., August 31, 2010 – Nasuni™, the leading gateway to the cloud, today announced that it will be offering free use of its service to proactively protect business-critical files of companies within hurricane-prone areas of the United States.  New Nasuni customers in specific Gulf Coast and southern Atlantic Coast states are eligible to safeguard and protect files by sending them to the cloud via the Nasuni Filer without incurring a charge of the company’s flat monthly fee for three months if they sign up from September 1 through the end of hurricane season on November 30.

Five years removed from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans, the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an “active” to “extremely active” hurricane season this year with an unusually high number of hurricanes developing in the Atlantic Ocean – with more predicted this year than any previous year since NOAA began issuing its seasonal forecasts in 1998.  Warmer surface water temperatures threaten to make for more powerful hurricanes impacting coastal states.  By using Nasuni’s gateway to the cloud, companies can take advantage of offsite data protection to ensure that files are safe and available for restore in case they are impacted by disaster.

“With just over a third of the country’s total population situated along the East Coast and prone to the severe winds, torrential rains and potential flooding that hurricanes bring, it is imperative that companies take proactive steps to ensure their business-critical data remains above the fray,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. “We want to help lessen the financial impact of companies during this particularly dangerous time of year, and are convinced that once they use the Nasuni Filer they will continue to take advantage of the benefits of automatic offsite backup that we provide.”

“The truth is increasingly understood that a company denied access to mission-critical data assets for longer than a week will likely be out of business within a year,” said Jon Toigo, veteran disaster recovery planner and author of several books on continuity planning.  “Without your data, your chances of making a successful recovery from any kind of disaster – whether a severe weather event or a simple software glitch or user error – are nil. Every company needs to have a procedure in place for protecting and replicating their data assets and for placing a secure copy of their data off site and out of harm’s way.  The trick is to make the process as simple and transparent as possible.  Nasuni provides an interesting option for a knotty problem.”

Nasuni brings the benefits of the cloud by simplifying file access, storage and protection while eliminating the expense of storage hardware and infrastructure expansion. Installation and setup in a virtual environment is easy and no additional hardware is required. The Nasuni Filer encrypts files and sends them to the cloud or clouds of the customer’s choice. A copy of the working set is cached in the local infrastructure so Nasuni can be used as primary storage instead of or in combination with traditional file servers because users get the fast access they are used to. Deduped snapshots are sent to the cloud, so files and recent changes are safe and protected with multiple copies.

Companies looking to store their files in the cloud during the hurricane season should sign-up for the month-to-month service by calling Nasuni at (800) 208-3418.  A billing address from a hurricane-prone state  – Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas – is required for free use of the Nasuni Filer. The offer does not include storage costs incurred from cloud storage providers.  At the end of the free promotional period, users will have the chance to continue service at the regular month-to-month rate or 1- or 2-year pre-purchase rates.  Full promotional details are available at the Nasuni website.

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About Nasuni
Nasuni delivers the leading cloud storage gateway that makes storage as a service into a practical business solution. The Nasuni Filer is a virtual NAS file server that runs on VMware and leverages the resources of the cloud to simplify file storage and protection. Targeting the mid-market, Nasuni’s solution eliminates the need for incremental storage hardware and the resulting capital expense to manage unstructured file growth. The company is backed by North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. To download the Nasuni Filer, or for more information, visit www.nasuni.com.