About Our Enterprise Cloud File and Data Storage System

Origin

When the New York Times launched its first web presence, new CTO Andres Rodriguez faced a major challenge – how to scale web services from 10,000 internal users to millions of subscribers. Andres’ IT team could have purchased racks of web servers and load balancers. But building out The Times’ data center wouldn’t withstand the massive number of hits to its site when a major story broke. Instead, Andres turned to Akamai, whose use of the internet to replicate and cache content globally provided scale a single enterprise couldn’t match. His early use of what is now considered a cloud service was a huge success.

As The Times began digitizing more of its content and production workflows, Andres soon encountered his next big challenge – how to store, protect, and manage the files that were doubling in size and number every year. He could have purchased racks of NetApp NAS devices, backup solutions, and disaster recovery infrastructure. But this hardware-based model could no longer support the magnitude of file growth. A new file services approach uniting the performance and access of NetApp with the scalability, stability, and global reach of Akamai was needed. Andres’ idea for “NAS Unified” – Nasuni – was born.

Leveraging the “New Disk”

Andres foresaw cloud object storage as the “new disk” – unlimited, durable, georedundant, and economical. His first company after The Times – Archivas – pioneered object storage in the cloud. Acquired by HDS, Archivas is now the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).

But, how to get files – the world’s fastest growing type of data – into these cloud object stores? A file system was the answer. Specifically, a next-generation global file system that could support a unified set of enterprise file services. Andres decided to start Nasuni, short for “NAS unified.”

Paul Flanagan became Nasuni’s first investor. Paul shared Andres’ vision and passion for a new type of global file infrastructure so fervently he later joined Nasuni as its president.

A File System in the Cloud?

Nasuni’s key innovation – now patented – moves the inode structures of a file system from hardware to the cloud. The result is the world’s first cloud-native global file system, Nasuni UniFS®. As the power behind the Nasuni platform, UniFS is enabling us to stay true to our founding beliefs that enterprise file services should: