Nasuni’s latest Cloud File Services (CFS) update takes care of tiering primary NAS files to secondary/archival storage in the cloud by presenting a single file namespace resource to users through front end caching appliances. It is as if users have a FaaS system – files-as-a-service.
At the same time, the company has modified licensing terms so that secondary/archival storage in the cloud is cheaper than primary file storage. Subscription costs are reduced automatically as primary files become “stagnant” – Nasuni’s term – and are moved to the archival tier.
Nasuni is a cloud storage gateway and cloud storage supplier. The basic UniFS file repository is Nasuni’s object storage in the public cloud. The caching can be on-premises, with physical or virtual Nasuni Edge Appliances, or in the public cloud itself.
UniFS stores files and metadata in object storage, then caches active data wherever high performance access is needed on Nasuni Edge Appliances – stateless virtual machines or hardware appliances that can be located on-premises or in the cloud.
According to Nasuni, users are freed of the burden of managing file classification and migration, while the IT department never again has to backup files, refresh NAS and file servers, and lease DR sites.
Nasuni CloudFS has been repackaged into four components:
- Primary offers scalable file storage and backup for active workloads with fast access to data cached on Nasuni Edge Appliances.
- Archive offers long-term file storage and rapid retrieval for secondary, less active file workloads.
- Synchronize extends the Primary and Archive services with file sharing across any number of locations.
- Collaborate extends Primary and Synchronize with a global file lock capability, enabling users to work on the same files from any location without version conflict.
The CloudFS update also has a bunch of optimisations which include faster data propagation across sites with tweaks to Nasuni’s cloud-based Global Volume Manager and Global File Lock.
Changes to the Nasuni Management Console (NMC) enable petabyte-scale customers to make global configuration changes more quickly. The Nasuni web browser client can browse large directories faster. An integration with Syslog enables Nasuni events to be reported on and analyzed.
Russ Kennedy, Nasuni’s chief product officer, announced record growth in its latest quarter with “our capacity under management double over the last 12 months with expanded enterprise adoption of Nasuni Cloud File Services. Our new capabilities and more flexible licensing options will enable us to grow even faster, and target the full spectrum of file workloads – from historical archiving to remote office file servers to multi-site file synchronization to high-end NAS – with a single consolidated platform.”
That’s the hope. The CFS update is available now.
+Comment
Nasuni, along with Panzura and Avere, was early into fast access to cloud storage with front-end caching. This market overlapped with file sync and share (Box, DropBox, Egnyte) and then a second wave of file data management startups – Actifio, Cohesity, Druva, Rubrik, etc. – came along to use cloud storage as part of their offerings centred on copy data management or data protection, and all offering a single interface into a unified view of secondary data, whether on-premises, in multiple public clouds or both.
Newer startups like LucidLink are looking to give fast access to public cloud storage, and others like Elastifile offer hybrid file data management.
It is a fast-developing area with multiple overlapping sectors and there is bound to be consolidation as players emerge from the pack to dominate this file data management area. Nasuni would wish to be a consolidator and not a consolidatee.
We think the company is moving to rapidly add machine learning tech to its software armoury to provide more and better file management and cloud broking services. B&F
