Nasuni Expands Its Board of Directors With Key Industry Leadership

This week we’re excited to announce that we added two new independent members to our Board of Directors. It’s not just that we filled these crucial slots, though. It’s who we added that has everyone here at Nasuni so excited. We have appointed storage and cloud leaders formerly from Netapp and Veeam.

The company experienced record growth last year, signing up some of our biggest and most exciting new clients to date, growing our business with existing customers, and adding a suite of amazing new features. There has been a tremendous shift over the past few years from demand for on premises file storage to a cloud approach. These are good times at the company. Yet we’re always looking for ways to improve, expand, and evolve. That’s where Peter McKay and Joel Reich are going to be a tremendous help.

Joel Reich has incredible domain-specific knowledge. A recently retired NetApp product executive with 17 years at the storage giant, and 30+ years in storage hardware, software, and systems, Joel witnessed firsthand the boom years of traditional file storage. He also saw the writing on the wall, and how the standard way of maintaining file infrastructure is not going to survive the next decade.

Peter McKay has a similarly exciting resume, with tremendous sales and marketing expertise. McKay is the CEO of Snyk, an open-source security company. He made some news last week because Snyk raised $150M recently. He was also co-CEO at Veeam and General Manager, Americas, at VMware. His knowledge of the industry, and his experience investing in and running high-growth technology companies, is going to be invaluable as we scale.

We are very excited to welcome Peter and Joel onto the Nasuni team, and we’re already leveraging their expertise.

Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity

Last week, at our annual Sales Kickoff, we had the pleasure of listening to Joel speak about the changes underway in the file storage market, and the unique opportunity in front of Nasuni. One of his first themes is one we know well. Joel noted that there’s no use fighting the move to the cloud anymore. It’s inevitable. Apps are being developed in the cloud or moving to the cloud. Infrastructure, too. And, of course, both structured and unstructured data are being migrated to object storage. We’re talking to companies that moved on from their CIOs because they didn’t move to the cloud fast enough.

Joel also had a really interesting take on a core Nasuni feature that we might undersell, to some extent. To him, operational simplicity is essential.

He emphasized that to succeed in the cloud era, your service or platform has to be easy to operate. Technical challenges are getting more and more complex, yet IT is overworked and understaffed. As a result, customers value operational simplicity more and more. The giant global companies have this cloud mandate hovering over their heads, and they want to be able to migrate their data as efficiently as possible, and get the most out of that data as soon as possible. Any solution that does this job simply, and takes the pain out of operating the new technology, has a competitive advantage.

As Joel explained, this is one of the reasons Pure and Nutanix disrupted the on-premises block storage market. They reduced the knobs and levers and product add-ons. They pushed out a solution that was easy to operate. A solution that just works.

Our customers say the same about Nasuni, and it’s one of the best endorsements a technology company could receive. ““I never have to get involved in storage at all,” says the former CIO of one of our clients. “It’s a black box and it just works.”

What Traditional File Storage/NAS Can’t Match

Simplicity is key, Joel emphasized, but obviously that’s not enough. One of the other reasons he agreed to join the board is that Nasuni delivers capabilities that traditional storage can’t match. According to Joel:

• Multi-site data access is very complicated with traditional NAS
• Data protection is very complicated with traditional NAS
• Hybrid cloud is complicated with traditional NAS

The Nasuni platform and our patented cloud-native file system, UniFS®, are built for these kinds of capabilities. Nasuni integrates simply and easily with hybrid cloud infrastructures. It extends instant file recovery to all global locations, even small and remote offices and temporary job sites. And our ability to unlock global collaboration workflows through our high-speed file synchronization, multi-site access, and Global File Lock® technology is unmatched.

When we went down the list of what Joel thinks a cloud file infrastructure solution needs to be, and what we deliver, the fit was perfect.

Again, here’s to our two new board members, and an exciting year ahead.