5 Reasons Ithaca Energy Prefers Nasuni Cloud File Storage to Traditional Infrastructure

We’re always excited when we get the chance to share another customer story, and our new case study on Ithaca Energy is compelling for a few reasons. Ithaca demonstrates our momentum in the file-centric oil and gas industry, proves that our edge appliances match rigorous performance demands, and shows that modernizing your traditional infrastructure with Nasuni is transformative in more ways than one.

But don’t take it from me. I’ll defer to IT Operations Manager Malcolm Brown of Ithaca Energy, who took the time to explain to us how Nasuni has impacted his organization. There’s more detail in the case study, but here are 5 reasons Ithaca Energy prefers agile Nasuni cloud file storage to traditional infrastructure.

1. Cost Savings

On average, Nasuni saves companies 50% versus traditional file storage and data protection infrastructure. Brown isn’t certain of the exact percentage for Ithaca, but he says the cost savings with Nasuni are real. “We put together a cost model which included, amongst other things, hardware file storage, tape backups and other products incurring annual maintenance fees,” Brown explains. “When we analyzed the model, it was clear that the Nasuni subscription model offered us cost savings.”

To better understand the hard and soft costs your organization can save by switching to the cloud, take a moment to listen to our on-demand webinar titled “Cloud Economics in a Time of Crisis.”

2. Infinite Scale

“We were always having to buy storage that would have to expand at some point in the future or be replaced completely, which was not a practical or cost-effective approach,” says Brown. Today, with Nasuni, all file data and metadata scales in cost-effective Azure Blob Storage. That means no more unplanned capacity upgrades or unexpected capital expenditures. Instead, storage capacity expands as needed.

3. Data Authenticity

Nasuni works differently than other storage or cloud storage platforms. Files are cached locally to maintain LAN-speed performance, but the gold or master copy of each and every file resides and scales in the cloud. The original and all the deltas are maintained in the cloud, with georedundant protection, as immutable objects.

There are a number of reasons we designed the technology this way, but Brown identified a benefit that he refers to as data authenticity. Again, I’ll leave it to him to explain.

“The original piece of data loaded into Nasuni never gets worked on. You’re only ever work­ing on a copy, so you can always go back to your original data,” Brown explains. “This is really valuable in our industry. You wouldn’t believe the number of times people have asked me to recover data as it was originally delivered to them.”

4. Faster Recoveries

Another strength of the cloud-native approach is that it completely changes data protection. With Nasuni, data protection isn’t bolted on as a separate system. It’s an integral part of the platform. Files are versioned to the cloud as they change, and the entire file system is protected in the cloud. If a disaster were to occur, Brown and his team can make data available to any of their locations within 30 minutes. That means business can continue as usual, and the company can continue making money, not losing it to downtime.

5. Lean Remote Operations

The combination of Nasuni’s cloud-native technology and intelligent caching appliances also drastically reduces the need for local infrastructure. Ithaca put Nasuni’s model to the test by deploying on an offshore oil rig – and it was a success. This gives Brown a model for future deployments. “We’ve now shown that we can run these offshore deployments in a production environment in a lean way,” he says. “We’ve proven that it works effec­tively in the offshore environment over a low bandwidth circuit with high-latency.”

There are more than 5 reasons Ithaca Energy chose Nasuni – cloud VDI benefits, mergers & acquisitions integration, etc. – but I don’t want to give away all the details from the case study. Take a minute and read the full story, and get back to us if you have any questions.