Making File Services As Scalable As the Cloud Itself: Nasuni

When the New York Times launched its first web presence, a witty mind, Andres Rodriguez faced a major challenge like 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 on 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.

Founded in 2009, Nasuni today is the leading provider of cloud-scale enterprise file services. Powered by the world’s first cloud-native global file system, Nasuni UniFS, it converges the solutions and processes previously needed to store, protect, access, and manage unstructured file data into a single, modern platform.

Why Nasuni?

Traditional device-centric file systems can no longer keep pace with the explosive growth of creative content, video, audio, industry-specific application files, IoT-generated files, and more but Nasuni has developed the first global file system that lives in cloud object storage.

Free of device constraints, Nasuni UniFS unlocks the infinite capacity, durability, and geo-redundancy of the “new disk.” Powered by the cloud and the company’s cloud-native global file system, the Nasuni hybrid cloud platform integrates previously disparate, siloed point tools into a single as-a-service solution.

Global file infrastructure that was costly, complex, and difficult to scale becomes one that is cost-effective, simple, and massively scalable. Designing a file system that can live and scale within the cloud isn’t easy. But for Nasuni, enterprise customers and the people who work there, it’s worth the effort.

Nasuni Offerings

Primary File Storage (NAS)

• Cloud-native global file system (Nasuni UniFS) - Store authoritative “gold copy” of every file and metadata (inodes) in the cloud. Provides a true global namespace for all primary file data that is not bound by local hardware.
• Cloud object storage integration - Select from leading private and public cloud providers. Nasuni support Amazon S3 Standard, Azure Hot GRS, Azure Hot LRS, Dell EMC ECS, IBM Cloud Object Storage and IBM Bluemix. Avoid cloud lock-in and gain the flexibility to meet geo-specific, bandwidth, and preferred vendor requirements.

File Archiving and Retrieval

• Cloud-native global file system (Nasuni UniFS) - store authoritative “gold copy” of every file and metadata (inodes) in the cloud. Provide a true global namespace for all long-term file data that is not bound by local hardware.
• Cloud object storage integration - Select from leading private and public cloud providers. Avoid cloud lock-in and gain the flexibility to meet geo-specific, bandwidth, and preferred vendor requirements

Backup and Recovery

• WORM model - Ensure data is never overwritten with Write Once Read Many (WORM) architecture. Provide immutable record of every file version.
• File-level restore - Enable IT to select individual files for rapid recovery using calendar interface in Nasuni Management Console. Recover easily from Ransomware, malware, corruptions, or user errors.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

• Geo-redundancy - Store multiple copies of file data in different geographic locations. Leverage native capability of cloud object storage provider to protect against regional disasters.
• Cloud-native global file system (Nasuni UniFS) - Store all files and metadata natively in the cloud. Eliminate dependencies on local hardware

Testimonials

"Nasuni is a very reliable and robust platform. It’s one thing I don’t need to worry about on evenings or weekends anymore. If you have collaborative needs or are looking to move to the cloud, I can’t think of a better product than Nasuni."

- Brian Erickson, IT Implementation and Acquisition Manager at APi Group

“We identified that staying with a traditional SAN was going to become a problem for us. When we moved all the data to Nasuni, our clientele inside the museum noted that access to that data was actually happening faster.”

- Rob Zschernitz, Chief Technology Officer

Howdy Chief!

Andres Rodriguez, Founder & CTO of Nasuni: Andres Rodriguez brings passion and energy to his role refining and communicating Nasuni’s technology strategy.

Andres was previously Founder and CEO at Archivas, creator of the first enterprise-class cloud storage system. After supporting the worldwide rollout of HCP as Hitachi’s CTO of File Services and seeing the Archivas team and technology successfully integrated, Andres turned his attention to his next venture, Nasuni (NAS Unified). Delivering value-added enterprise file services on top of cloud object storage was the natural progression of Andres’ cloud storage vision.

Before founding Archivas, Andres was CTO at the New York Times, where his ideas for digital content storage, protection, and access were formed. He joined The Times through its acquisition of Abuzz, the pioneering social networking company Andres co-founded.

Andres has a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering and a Master of Physics degree from Boston University. He holds numerous patents and is an avid swimmer.

“Powered by the cloud and our cloud-native global file system, our hybrid cloud platform integrates previously disparate, siloed point tools into a single as-a-service solution.”