
Dow’s journey to the cloud with Nasuni
About Dow
Dow is a globally distributed organization managing a complex IT environment, including cloud hosting, on-premise infrastructure, and data centers. Previously, the company relied heavily on legacy systems, servers, tape backup management, and mainframes. As a conservative organization with years invested in its legacy infrastructure, Dow embarked on a journey to migrate to the cloud to eliminate end-of-life technology, lower costs, and improve agility while ensuring seamless performance and security for its global workforce.The challenge
Dow faced significant challenges migrating from its legacy systems, including NetApp file systems, legacy services, and tape backups, to a modern cloud-based infrastructure.
The company needed a seamless migration solution for its globally distributed workforce to avoid downtime and disruption while ensuring data security, resiliency, and effective backup recovery.Performance was another critical concern, as users required fast, low-latency file access comparable to their on-premise systems. Alternative solutions, such as Azure File System, NetApp, and ANF, fell short of providing the integration, security, and performance Dow required while avoiding the high costs of new hardware investments.
How Nasuni helped Dow
Nasuni’s seamless migration substantially cut down Dow’s migration time.
Nasuni enabled Dow to migrate legacy NetApp file systems to Nasuni appliances with “zero user impact,” according to Dow’s IT Director, Tony Rubenacher. File links, structures, and functionality remained intact, and migrations that previously took days or weeks were completed in hours.Nasuni knew precisely how to optimize Dow’s environment.
Nasuni leveraged Azure blob storage, enhancing cost-efficiency, performance, and security across Dow’s IT environment.Nasuni drastically improved latency and performance.
Dow users, particularly in Texas, experienced significant performance improvements. Rubenacher states, “Our users in our Texas operations are able to pull down very large files that used to take them 5 to 10 minutes. Now they’re able to pull those files down from the cloud through Nasuni in seconds.”Nasuni enhanced Dow’s systems security and immutability.
Nasuni’s out-of-the-box immutable backups and advanced recovery features met Dow’s stringent security requirements.We were able to install the Nasuni appliances globally and take advantage of blob storage in Azure, which has resulted in an optimized environment from a cost perspective, an efficiency, and a performance, and a security perspective.
Tony Rubenacher, IT Director
The Nasuni difference
Nasuni provided Dow with a transformative solution that addresses its operational, performance, and security challenges while optimizing costs. Unlike traditional systems, Nasuni enabled the seamless migration of Dow’s legacy system while enabling performance gains, increasing built-in security, and reducing costs. Reflecting on Dow’s experience with Nasuni, Rubenacher comments, “It’s been a very good solution. It’s given us the ability to optimize our environment and forego buying new hardware.”Additionally, Nasuni is encouraging and positioning Dow to adopt more advanced solutions, such as Nasuni IQ, for enhanced file management and auditing to help them scale in the future.
Industry: Manufacturing
Cloud file storage: Nasuni
Object storage: Microsoft Azure Blob storage