Nasuni Primary Use Case

Greg Robson - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Owner, Collaboration & Productivity at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Nasuni is replacing our old file-sharing system based on StorSimple, a Microsoft appliance that uses server message block technology. SMB enables you to store a range of file types. You can store Office files and various file types that require this technology. They are application-related files that interact with executables, such as INI files, library files, etc. 

Now, Nasuni is fulfilling StorSimple's role as the multipurpose storage solution for our application-related files. It isn't storing documents like Office 365 files, PDFs, email, VIZIO, etc. We can keep those files in SharePoint.

The management console runs on a private cloud, but Nasuni hosts the file servers on an AWS public cloud. We have around 12,000 users, but the active user base is approximately 5,000. Various departments access Nasuni, including HR, finance, legal, and occasionally C-Suite executives. 

Our insurance and banking operations use it because they have managed and user-developed applications that use Nasuni and require SMB technology. It stores all the files apps need to run. Reports, documents, snapshots, and things like that are also stored in the same place in Nasuni. That's the appropriate use for it, but some users are misusing it. For example, some people are using unified storage instead of SharePoint. 

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MC
Director of Technical Strategy at a marketing services firm with 10,001+ employees

We use Nasuni to provide local access to files with data stored in the cloud, so we don't have to worry about backups. It offers fast access to the data and supports multi-site configuration. Nasuni allows us to collaborate across five or six sites using the same data set.

We have probably 600 filers deployed predominantly on-site, and the rest are primarily on a public cloud. However, we still have 20 filers on a private cloud. We use Nasuni on Azure and AWS, but we mostly work on AWS and have Clever Safe for our private cloud. Nasuni supports everything, including Azure, VM, GCP, and private cloud. It works on any cloud that supports S3.

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Richard McGregor - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Server & Storage Manager at Conde Nast Publications

Our use case at the moment is for our file storage for all our London offices. It's for our London editorial teams, our London business units, and also our college.

We tend to keep it up to date in terms of the version. We're pretty much only a week or so behind a certain release because we know how easy the upgrade process is and we also know how successful the upgrades are. We've never had to roll back any upgrades. We've never experienced any issues with the upgrade process. So, we always keep it on its latest and greatest.

We're currently only using it in our London offices. We have our backend storage, which is AWS at the moment. It's about 100 terabytes of S3 storage, and in front of the S3 storage, we have three physical filers. Two of them are in our London offices and one is in our colocation data center. We have a virtual filer as well, which is running on our Nutanix hypervisor. 

It's pretty much all cloud. The on-premise is pretty much just a cache. They're just filers. They're just for the speed. We're a media and publications house. So, we need our files quite close to us so that we have a cache of those files, and our editors can access those files quickly and responsively.

When we purchased it years ago, we could only get it on Azure, but because we are 99% AWS, it was better that we moved over to have our costs in line with our other AWS spend.

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Buyer's Guide
Nasuni
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nasuni. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
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NJ
Cloud Support Service Lead at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We are using Nasuni for all of our storage needs. All the storage for our video surveillance and documents is on a couple of Nasuni filers. We have around 29 filers. We have 3 physical filers, and we have 26 virtual filers.

In terms of the version, we upgraded Nasuni Management Console (NMC) on May 20. So, NMC is on 22.1, and the filers are also on the latest version, which is 9.7.3. 

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Wayne Brehob - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Linux & Storage Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We have multiple use cases. We have a lot of user data from users who share Excel files, Word files, et cetera. It is often used for their home directories, for Windows, and their folders and shared folders.

We also use it for test data.

And at remote sites where there are SQL backups, we'll dump those backups into it to get them offsite, because it's mirrored to AWS.

We also have users with multi-protocol files. They run CE solvers and the results get transferred to Nasuni and then they can get to them from wherever they are.

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PS
Chief Information Officer at ISL Engineering and Land Services Ltd.

We needed a solution that would allow our 12 offices to collaborate from one central location of active business data that is continuously synchronized and backed up. This is the problem that Nasuni solved for us.

Our environment includes Nasuni's cloud-based file storage called UniFS, and at each site, we have a filer on-premise. Our normal SAN/NAS refresh cycle at each office location was 3 to 5 years. This IT work involved a lot of time, effort, and cost involving research, planning, and deployment of the properly sized SAN/NAS. With Nasuni, this hardware refresh cycle has literally stopped. Our capacity now scales on-demand.

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Fee Chong - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at RRC POWER & ENERGY, LLC

Nasuni is our file system. Our employees including, engineers, designers,  and accounting, store files on the system. And we have the on-prem filer, so the office folks can use File Explorer to browse the drive and retrieve or store files. 

Our remote users usually use VPN to access our files at our data center. At the data center we have one filer for the remote workers to access.

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Barry Sunanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect - Data and Solutions at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I used Nasuni for a client in the energy sector. Their entire subsurface storage portfolio is in Microsoft Azure. They have different types of storage, like database storage, blob storage, and what we call project storage. In Azure, there's also something called AFS or Azure file storage. 

We use Nasuni in a couple of ways. The primary use is to act as a sort of surveillance tool for managing our storage on Microsoft Azure. Natsuni also has options for storing data. We're managing our data inside of Nasuni. We allocate specific resources and server volumes. We use Nasuni to monitor our storage space and tell us when it will run out of space. 

It helped us manage some analytics out of there. Every cloud provider has a cost attached to every type of storage. We can do an economic analysis on our storage between Nasuni and Microsoft Azure. We've found that Nasuni storage is cheaper on some fronts, so we use Nasuni to copy some of the data from Microsoft Azure into Nasuni Storage. If I had to summarize it, Nasuni is a storage management, control, and surveillance platform that we use. We also use it to gain some useful insights into the cost and economics of storing data in these two different environments.

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WK
SA at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We have people in the field worldwide who go to various locations to gather data. After they gather the data, they need to upload it for our lab technicians and services to analyze. Somebody's out in a remote location, and they need to get that data back to the United States, but we can't send it via FTP to the local office. We need a system that can quickly offload the data to the technician and an automated way to deliver it to the branches. That's what Nasuni does for us.

Our company has 10 major locations, and the user count is about 150 at any given time. Nasuni users include data analysts, lab technicians, field technicians, and branch personnel administrators.

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JJ
IT Manager at a marketing services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are a global media company and I look after eight Nasuni Filers for the UK and Ireland.

In the UK, every Nasuni appliance is stored locally in an office. They are stored in a standard comms room, and if that office went down for any reason, there are snapshots of the data made every hour that could be accessed.

A web version of the data can be available if there was a need due to an outage in a local office, so we can keep the business working.

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SH
Technical Lead for Infrastructure Support at a engineering company with 10,001+ employees

We implement Nasuni for our customers. We also manage the solution and provide support. Our client is a global company that operates worldwide with a user base in the thousands. We have a 20-person team working with them. 

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Shailender-Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at HCL Technologies

We are using it as a file share server. The solution is for CIFS and Windows file shares. We have boxes deployed in different environments, including on-prem and, in a few locations, it's in a virtual image.

We provide support to our customers and are currently managing more than 200 devices.

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NP
Account Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

We have one parent file system connected to three Nasuni systems. One is in the APAC region, and two are located in the US. The file system is connected across all three locations so that people can access the file system anywhere in the network. 

It's connected to object storage in the background, and we have some capacity there. We have a license of up to 500 TB that we manage, including all the data required for archiving or anything. We use it to create a backup pool in our cloud object storage and only use it for full backup.

We use Nasuni for daily activities. For example, some file shares have assigned tools and servers. People use it to create some requests for data recovery when data on the server is lost. The user asks us to create a new location from Nasuni. We also have some patches that must be updated on the cloud each month, and I'll use Nasuni to monitor any issues. 

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SM
Managing Director of IT at a construction company with 201-500 employees

The use case specifically is to allow our engineering staff in different offices to be able to work collaboratively on the same projects at the same time. Also, another important feature for us is the ability to recover or restore data from any point in time in its history.

We have Nasuni Filers deployed at each of our offices in the US and another location in India. Nasuni is used by our engineering staff and where production engineering data is stored.

The cloud is used for synchronization from site to site as well as for backup and storing all our snapshot historical data.

We use different cloud providers for different things. Currently, hard Nasuni data is in AWS.

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CZ
Server Engineering Services Lead at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees

We use Nasuni to provide storage at various locations. It is for office-type files that they would use for day-to-day office work, such as spreadsheets. None of it is critical data.

Each group at each site has its own data store. For example, HR has its own, and finance has its own. All of these different groups at different locations use this data, and they use these filers to store it.

The Nasuni filers are on-site, and we have virtual edge appliances on ESX servers at about 35 sites globally. The data stored at these sites is then fed up into Azure and we have all of our data stored there.

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Tony Scrimenti - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director, Architecture and Cloud at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

Unified, global file sharing while reducing costs and eliminating backups.

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JM
CIO at Jerde

We use the Nasuni Filers and Nasuni Management Console (NMC) to manage those Filers.

We have four offices in Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. In each office, we have a Nasuni Cloud Storage Gateway that allows end users in each office to access their data in the cloud. However, that data is cached locally.

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KM
Cloud Engineering Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use Nasuni for our network file servers. My company switched from Windows file servers to Nasuni, and we leveraged it to manage migrations between data centers.

The storage is fully in the cloud, and we are starting to migrate more as a company towards the cloud. I would say today, we have about a quarter of our overall workload in the cloud.  However, in the next few years, we will shift even further into the cloud.

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SA
Infrastructure Support at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

It's mostly for internal users. We use it for internal file sharing. We have moved our various departments, such as marketing, finance, and HR, to Nasuni. We started using it because of the StorSimple devices coming to an end of life. Microsoft announced that, so we considered Nasuni as the first option for internal file sharing of users.

It's on the cloud, but we started on-prem. We borrowed the filer from Nasuni themselves and completed the migration just to speed up the process, and then we sent the filer back. We are now completely on the cloud backed up by AWS.

We are using its latest version. We did the update two weeks ago to the latest version that we received from them.

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RR
Hybrid Cloud Lead at Kyndryl

I am a Nasuni implementer, not an end user. We have deployed Nasuni at nearly 150 offices worldwide. The backend is an IBM cloud, and we use VMware ESXi on the deployment side. Due to the price of the IBM cloud, we will likely switch to Azure or AWS. 

From a disaster recovery perspective, we have synchronization across three locations: Houston, Atlanta, and one other. Nasuni is replicating among those. The IBM cloud is in the backend, and we deploy the Nasuni filer appliance to various locations. It transmits the cache to that particular location's bucket, which is replicated in the cloud data center, providing redundancy.

We haven't enabled Nasuni's Access Anywhere feature on this project because the client doesn't want users to access storage from anywhere. Users need to connect with the network via VPN, and they access the solution from there. We have also enabled global file locking, where the data resides at other locations, but most users access it from another place. 

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SB
Infrastructure Project Manager at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use the solution for file sharing, redundancy, and restore features. 

Regarding cloud strategy, we use a bucket in the cloud, but it's all private, so nothing public hits it. We have elements including the bucket, a filer, and an MC component; it's all there but only accessible from within. Part of our strategy when deploying filers and locations is to ensure firewalls are set so that traffic never exits; it's technically the internet, but we use a private IP, so no data travels over.  

Nasuni hasn't replaced any other solutions; we use it side-by-side and implement it at new sites. We're an extensive organization, so we can't just replace tools; it would take a very long time, and the initiative would have to be of great importance. Much money and work would go into replacing products, including storage requirements, buying a filer and spooling it up, and all the associated activity across multiple sites.

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Ivan Dretvic - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT Architecture at a wellness & fitness company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have multiple physical locations and we had to find an alternative data repository so that we could transition from some legacy technology like Microsoft StorSimple. We needed a cloud-native solution that would be more cost-effective than some of the other vendors out there. We ended up going with Nasuni primarily for file server access for three locations within Australia.

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SW
Senior Software Engineer at Outward Inc

I work for a retail company. We have our users spread out geographically across the globe. We have deployed Nasuni in all our remote locations. With this service, we are catering to users across different continents, such as the EMEA, APAC, North American, and South American regions.

It is deployed on-premises through Azure appliances.

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SK
Technical Director at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

It is mainly used for file storage.

I belong to the administration part of the storage team who use it to handle all the file servers and the SAN storage. I manage a team who handles the day-to-day tasks of Nasuni. We have multiple teams who take care of our work on the Nasuni. There is a separate team who works on deployment and another separate team who handles the BAU tasks. So, we have different teams who work on different parts.

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JP
Head Of Information Technology at Invictus

We have two offices and each one has a local appliance that we use as file servers. They both replicate to each other, and we have a third appliance in Azure for DR. If a file server goes down in one office, we can use the other one. And if both go down, we can use the one in Azure.

It's a hybrid. So we have two appliances and one cloud-based appliance.

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RM
Sr. IT Network Infrastructure Engineer at a construction company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nasuni is our data storage solution. In addition, it's our data backup solution. As a construction company, we have onsite offices where we're building a building, a highway, or a water treatment plant, and we use Nasuni for data storage for all of those job sites. Additionally, for all of our regional offices, Nasuni is our storage solution for our entire company's internal data.

It has on-prem and SaaS components, but for all intents and purposes, it is on-prem.

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WK
SA at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use it for a couple of business units that need to quickly transfer data from the field to our offices. They run tests in the field and then they have to get that data uploaded quickly. They connect to the filers in our cloud, and that allows the data to snapshot across to all the Nasuni environments within our organization.

It's deployed through a combination of on-prem and cloud. It's more of a platform as a service or infrastructure as a service because we have hardware appliances that connect to our Azure infrastructure in the cloud.

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DH
Sr. Systems Analyst at a government with 501-1,000 employees

We use Nasuni to replicate sensitive data from on-premise to the cloud.

We have a hybrid deployment. It is hosted by a company in the cloud, but it is not our company. 

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TB
Server Analyst at McGough Construction

We have one physical filer on-premises and six virtual filers.

Our primary use case is as a NAS service, and we use it for all of our companywide drives. It contains home drives, department drives, file sharing, etc. All of our end-users put their data on these drives.

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SR
Global Business Information Security Officer at a marketing services firm with 10,001+ employees

We primarily use Nasuni as a file server. It is an enterprise cloud gateway.

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JG
IT Infrastructure Manager at McLaren Construction Group

We need a traditional file server-type solution while reducing all of the complexities around the management of it.

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SD
Infrastructure Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We are using it as shared storage so that our users can share data between multiple departments.

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RA
System Administrator at a marketing services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use Nasuni for our production files so that they can be accessed from multiple facilities at once. 

It is deployed through VMware. 

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MS
IT Infrastructure Design Lead at Ulteig Engineers, Inc.

We are using it for enterprise file storage. We have its latest version, and it is a hybrid deployment. The actual storage or data resides in the Azure cloud, but you access it either through VMs or hardware that you deploy on your premises. 

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reviewer1652109 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We use Nasuni to share data between our sites. It allows us to use a single volume at different sites and different locations, which means that it is easier for us to collaborate. We used to have a small, constant amount of storage space in our server but Nasuni and cloud storage allows us to grow with no limits.

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Buyer's Guide
Nasuni
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nasuni. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.