Simpler, Faster, Better: Nasuni Cloud File Services 9.5

My role at Nasuni has changed over the years, but I have always been an advocate for technical upgrades that make the platform simpler, faster, and more powerful. Our 9.5 release, which is in limited availability now, will be generally available early next year, and delivers all of these values in one package. In this post, I’d like to highlight several technical improvements, which fall into a few broad categories, and review what I think 9.5 is going to do for our customers.

Better Management
You may have seen the recent announcement of our newest intelligent cloud service, Global File Acceleration (GFA), whose goal is to dramatically improve multi-site file synchronization for users globally. This has proven to be a big hit with our largest customers, as more than 50 major customers are putting it to work already. I’m excited that our customers are now benefiting from nearly a 50% improvement with multi-site file sync times. In this 9.5 release, we are empowering our customers to activate and configure various GFA behaviors on their own without Nasuni Support. There are further enhancements coming, but this release effectively hands the reins to our customers and lets you manage more aspects of the service yourself. For example, to optimize performance based on your unique business needs, you can now customize GFA behavior by prioritizing file protection or collaboration activities for multi-site file synchronization.

Another of our long-standing goals at Nasuni is to simplify storage, access, sharing, and protection of files with our cloud file services. The Nasuni Management Console (NMC) has always been a significant part of that effort, as it gives IT the ability to do more through a single, easy-to-use web interface. In the 9.5 release, NMC becomes a standalone product independent of the Nasuni Edge Appliance. What this means is that you’ll be able to leverage new NMC features and enhancements sooner, without having to wait for them to be packaged into a larger release.

Improved Migrations
The faster you move your files to the cloud, the sooner you can start leveraging the benefits of Nasuni and accelerating ROI. On that front, improving data migration is another ongoing focus and one that my team and I are strong proponents for in product roadmap planning. I’m delighted to report that the 9.5 release includes optimizations to the UniFS® file system and architecture that result in up to 30% faster new file creations, so our customers now gain an even quicker path to simplifying their enterprise file storage.

We’re doing other things to simplify migrations for our customers, too. This new release includes support for built-in Windows users and groups, allowing a Nasuni Edge Appliance to function more like a Windows file server. In the past, customers migrating from Windows sometimes had to jump through many administrative hoops to maintain permissions and access that were based on local Windows users and groups. Now, we’ve reduced much of the complexity and unnecessary headaches, making it easier to migrate your files to Nasuni from these configurations, without the hassle of having to identify and change user permissions when migrating data from Windows file servers.

Speed & Performance
Generally, this release promotes many speed and performance increases. You’ll be able to independently optimize and improve the performance of GFA. You’ll see NMC updates sooner. Data migrations, as I mentioned above, will happen faster.

Yet, the release also delivers significantly faster data protection to the cloud, optimizing the snapshot process for new or changed files. With this new 9.5 release, our customers should see a dramatic reduction in the time it takes to propagate new and changed data to the cloud from multiple Edge Appliances. This enhancement improves performance for both data protection and multi-site file sharing for our customers globally.

Certifications
Finally, as we do with each release cycle, we’ve certified additional technologies that expand our cloud ecosystem and help our customers further maximize the performance and availably of their Nasuni environment.

Nasuni officially supports the new AWS archive storage class, Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires instant retrieval. Customers can take advantage of this storage class by implementing S3 lifecycle policies to move rarely accessed objects to a lower cost tier for additional savings.

Nasuni now also supports Amazon EBS io2 volumes, a newer generation of Provisioned IOPS SSD-based EBS volumes that are designed to meet the needs of I/O-intensive workloads that may be sensitive to storage performance or that require low latency.

Additionally, this release introduces four new AWS regions that our customers can utilize for high availability, or to maintain the data geographically closer to their users and applications to optimize latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements.

My team and I are excited about this release, and we are confident it’s the highest-quality, most-tested release to date. There is so much more in the works, though, and I look forward to sharing more news about what’s in store in 2022, as we continue to work behind the scenes to make Nasuni faster, more powerful, and easier to use.