Nasuni Reviews

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.

Nasuni has replaced massive SANs that were expensive, slow, and kept all the data. With the SANs, backup and recovery was very slow. With Nasuni, the simplicity of management is light-years ahead of our previous processes because the old backup and recovery was so slow, and we had to keep growing the SAN as the business grew. Now, we're leveraging the cloud as our storage, and the local appliances mean fast performance for the users.

Eliminating the on-premises infrastructure has reduced our costs by a good 50 percent. We have also had decreased capital costs because the cost of the appliances has gone down.

The solution also provides Continuous File Versioning. We do it every five minutes. There have been many times that people have called me and said they need a file at a specific point in time. We're able to provide that recovery, which is great. Before, maybe we were backing up once a day and, a week later, we wouldn't have the file versioning anymore with traditional SAN. In terms of restores, people delete things by accident all the time and having the ability to restore has been great.

And when it comes to our IT operations, it's made things easier and more streamlined. People have more confidence in the infrastructure. It's had a positive impact.

The most valuable feature is the storage in that it only keeps the last-used data locally, while everything else is backed up to the cloud. That way, we never really have to worry about file space in each office or the replication to the other file servers for DR.

It also provides a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. That's very important to us because we always know what the status is. It gives us views into it and also helps with auditing, tracing, and tracking of who's accessing things and who's doing what. And there is also the recovery from the cloud.

Nasuni also enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. The unlimited capacity is very important because with other solutions, as files grow, you're always having to add more storage. Here, the algorithm just caches what's being used and archives what's not, and if you need to get those archives, it's very simple to get them back.

The only thing that I'd like to see is more support for platforms like OneDrive or Box.com.

I have been using Nasuni for one year.

It's always available because we're utilizing Microsoft Azure. And on-premises, the hardware seems to be pretty stable.

The scalability is very good. If you want to add a new office, you can scale pretty quickly. You add a new appliance, add the volume, and it just works.

Right now our environment is about 10 terabytes. We expect a normal usage increase of about 10 percent per year. We have 150 daily users. They're across the company, including the business side, the back-office side. Everybody in the firm uses it.

I would rate their support at 10 out of 10. Anytime I have an issue, they answer very quickly.

It's super-easy to configure the solution. They were great to install, cut-over, and it's great to use. I worked with their implementation consultant. We set it up, we cut over the data, and it was all pretty simple and straightforward.

Our deployment took one month.

Our experience with their consultant during the deployment was great.

The pricing is on par with everybody else, and fair.

We looked at CTERA. The main differences between that and Nasuni are the usability features; the global file locking and caching. Nasuni is better.

As for business agility and cash flow compared to buying fixed assets, with Nasuni we still have their appliances so every three to five years we have to do a hardware refresh. We're not 100 percent in the cloud. But it's easy. It's very easy to buy a new appliance and cut over.

If a colleague at another company had concerns about migration to the cloud and about the solution's performance, I would say "Go ahead and do it. It will make your life a lot easier and the transition is not that difficult."

The ease of use is pretty good. It just works well for us. I'm pretty excited about it.

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.

Nasuni replaced our previous data storage solution for all our job sites back in 2018. Before that, if we had a job where a data server was stolen or a file was deleted, it was a long and onerous process to get that data back. For us, just like pretty much every other company out there, our data, our intellectual property, is significantly more important than the hardware itself. Once we rolled out Nasuni, we were able to restore deleted files in seconds, as opposed to days or weeks. It takes five or six clicks and we're able to restore data.

Additionally, if one of our offices has an electrical or power issue, we are able to move our end-users to a different edge appliance where they can access their data, minimizing downtime for our end-users.

It has also replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single, global file system, and that is extremely important. We have one platform to manage all of our data, to see it and to quickly access it, and that is huge. On top of that, Nasuni provides something called the NMC, or the Nasuni Management Console, which manages all of our Nasuni edge appliances. Not only can we manage the data, but we can also manage the appliances from a single pane of glass. Instead of having to log in to 50, 75, or 100 appliances, we can just log in to one device and manage everything from there, monitor alerts, push out updates, et cetera. It's really helpful.

With the NMC, when we are asked to restore a deleted file, we can do that from that one console, as opposed to going to the specific appliance the end-user was using to access data. From an IT perspective and a support perspective, the fact that we can use one location to access all of our edge appliances and do the work that we need to do, such as a file restore, makes it significantly easier for us. In turn, it makes things easier, quicker, and more efficient for our end-users. When a mistake happens, we can quickly apply whatever the corrective action may be and get our end-users back to accessing the data that they need.

The NMC has made things even simpler by providing one area where we can manage all of our edge appliances, as opposed to hitting each edge appliance individually. The NMC has really made it more efficient, streamlined, and simple for us to manage our data environment.

With Nasuni, our data is stored in volumes. If we have to provide data to an internal business group, it's easy for us to set up a new volume of data, if needed, to make it unique to that business group. We can also just provide remote access for another group internally to an existing volume that we have. In terms of giving the right people access to the data they need, Nasuni makes it pretty easy to do. That makes our business more efficient and more streamlined. It cuts down on internal workload and the tickets to our department, the IT department, to give end-users access to the data they need. As a department, we have become more proactive in recognizing and giving correct access to the data the end-users need.

With continuous file versioning, the way our data is backed up allows us to recover quickly if some of our data is compromised by a ransomware attack. We can simply revert back to a different point in time before that attack took place and make that data available to our end-users. That makes things much easier for us and gives us one less thing to worry about.

In addition, with continuous file versioning, there are some tools in Nasuni to very quickly help us restore a file that's been deleted or corrupted, back to a time where it was not deleted or corrupted. We have that functionality in the NMC and we can restore a file in just a few minutes.

Another benefit is that Nasuni has helped to eliminate infrastructure significantly. About 90 percent of our jobs are scenarios where we're onsite building a building or a stretch of highway and, for those jobs, we have saved on hardware costs and have not had to purchase a server. Instead, we have been able to access other edge appliances within the company. We can utilize existing hardware and don't need to buy new hardware for a particular job. That has certainly saved a lot of money on hardware, on the order of a few thousand dollars for the cost of a job-site server.

And that has made our infrastructure support efforts a lot more streamlined. It has reduced the soft costs, including the time the entire IT department spends on getting things up and running, and the time spent supporting users when a file gets moved or deleted and has to be restored to an earlier time.

We can also accurately forecast our costs for replacing the 10 percent of our Nasuni edge appliances that are on-prem, as needed. We know what to expect, how much life we can get out of them, and forecast when we will need to replace one. There is a need for hardware replacement, but that need has decreased. While we have established, internally, that we need to have that on-premises machine, we have virtualized many of our Nasuni edge appliances going forward, minimizing that hardware footprint that we have to manage.

From an agility perspective, our onsite people who are building something have the ability to access their data from any location and they can go back to the data for jobs they previously worked on. An end-user can be starting up a new job and, at the same time, can close out a job that was run somewhere else. Nasuni gives them that flexibility, making them more productive from one location. In addition, many of our end-users work at multiple locations and may be in five different locations from Monday to Friday. They're able to access all the data they need from those different locations and that is definitely a part of what they need to be successful.

One of the things we find most valuable is how quickly we can restore a deleted file. An unexpected byproduct of this feature is the ransomware protection that Nasuni provides as well. 

Another helpful feature, in addition to restoring a file that was deleted within 24 to 48 hours, is that we have the ability to restore a file or a folder that was deleted, going all the way back to the inception of that file or folder. That means we actually have unlimited backups to the inception point of data with Nasuni.

In addition, Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it’s needed, on-demand, and without limits. That's important to our company because, as a construction company, we are often building where nothing else exists. We may be adding a new stretch of highway, or replacing a stretch of highway in a remote area, or building a water treatment plant in a remote, desolate area where one doesn't exist. The ability to give our end-users their data, safely and securely, is huge. When we are informed of a new job that we have to work on, we can usually get that project management team up and running with access to their data within three to four hours. For our transient workforce, where people are at a location for 12 months or 24 months and then move, having the ability to move to a new location and access new data, as well as old data to close out an old job, is critical to the way that our workforce gets the job done.

One area that we've recently spoken to Nasuni about is single sign-on.

Another is integrating Nasuni with Azure Active Directory. In our particular case, that would allow for third-party consultants to access our Azure Active Directory environment as opposed to coming to our on-premises environment. 

Nasuni is aware of these issues which are something of a wishlist for us, and we hope they will work on them sooner rather than later.

I have been using Nasuni for 10 years.

Nasuni has developed a good product that is secure and allows our end-users the flexibility they need to access their data. We're very confident in Nasuni and in what they provide. We're hopeful that they can continue to stay up with the times, but we're completely comfortable with the stability and the footprint that they've created in the data storage field.

The product was built and designed to be scalable. We can add on new devices, new edge appliances, in less than a day, whether they are physical or virtual devices. The fact that we can do that quickly is really helpful in our environment. If we need to scale down, we can do that as well and move our end-users to a different edge appliance to access data when their primary one is being decommissioned or needs service. The scalability is definitely an asset of Nasuni.

We have about 3,500 to 4,000 employees and all of them are users of Nasuni. They include everyone from upper management and ownership, all the way down to people in the field and college interns at our job sites who help us complete the projects we're working on. Everyone in our company accesses that data.

We increase our storage by 10 to 20 percent every year. Data storage is a growing need in our company. I don't see that increase in storage diminishing any time soon.

We require two people for maintenance of Nasuni. They do things such as building a new edge appliance and monitoring for and implementing new version installations. They restore files that have been deleted or moved and work with our vendor when it comes to licensing renewal and when we need to purchase physical hardware. They are also the main point of contact for opening support tickets if an issue arises.

I give their tech support a 10 out 10. They're great.

This is the first vendor that has helped us with all our data storage. Before, we did all that internally.

We have a license that we renew annually and we recently renewed about 250 terabytes of data. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

If a colleague at another company told me they have concerns about migration to the cloud, I would say Nasuni has put a great deal of effort into simplifying and streamlining the migration process. We did not go through that, as our process was a little bit unique when we moved our data over to Nasuni. But in the years that I've been working with Nasuni, I have seen them put a lot of time and effort into streamlining that process to move data from an existing storage solution over to their cloud data storage solution.

When it comes to the migration, the amount of time you put into preparing and organizing your data will make that transition smoother and more efficient. If your source data is permissioned properly and the overall hierarchy is as organized as it can be before you move it, that will make that process significantly easier. Also make sure that end-users are accessing the data they need to access. Put time and effort into making sure that is correct, as opposed to making it a "Wild West" and giving everyone access to everything.

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.

When our field techs collect data from the units they're inspecting, that data is being uploaded and made visible on-demand. The way we're configured, those snapshots commit every five minutes. Within a five-minute window, based on bandwidth, that data will be available to any of the business units that are looking for it at our various locations.

Nasuni has definitely simplified our data management. Before we implemented it, we were struggling to figure out how to get data to different locations. It was a challenge. But the unified file system turned that into a very straightforward process. Everybody uploads their data to that directory structure and the data becomes available for everybody in all our locations.

Thankfully, we've never had a ransom attack, but the fact that we can restore data within that five-minute window, after each snapshot, has been extremely helpful. The continuous file versioning also makes recovery of a deleted file a very straightforward process through the NMC, the Nasuni Management  Console. One of the server administrators for Nasuni follows a few quick steps to restore that file. We've had to do that several times, and it has been a very straightforward process.

In addition, the snapshotting, which is our backup, has made Nasuni extremely easy when it comes to maintenance. It's a set-and-forget type of operation. With that snapshot continually running and always capturing the latest data, it's providing a backup at that point. It's very straightforward in terms of the impact on our IT.

The snapshot functionality and the unified file system are definitely the most valuable features for us. The UFS allows everybody across the organization to see the exact same data at the same time, instead of having different file servers with different structures on them, and that's mission-critical. We have different branches throughout our organization that have to act on that data. When it's uploaded to Nasuni and it's snapshotted out to all locations, each one does something specific with that data. It has to be consistent across the board, with multiple people accessing it. We have to make sure that everybody's on the same page.

I would like to see improvement in the training Nasuni provides. Compared to some of the other vendors out there, like Microsoft, where you can find how-to videos, Nasuni only has a lot of PDF documents that you have to go hunting for. It's workable, it certainly isn't a problem, but video walkthroughs would always be helpful. Microsoft offers that a lot for its infrastructure.

We've been using Nasuni for about six years.

Early on, there were some concerns, but over the last couple of years, the stability has been flawless.

It seems that if we were to have to scale out, it would be a very straightforward and simple process.

We have a couple of hundred technicians who connect to Nasuni, and on our engineering team there are 30 to 40 people who are retrieving and relying on the data that's coming in.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, it's taken care of by our infrastructure team that consists of three to four members of our IT team, but it does not require full-time attention. They handle administrative duties, assigning access to folders and directories. It uses Microsoft's NTFS permissioning and they add members to the group. It's not really Nasuni maintenance, it's actually the directory structure that makes up the day-to-day maintenance. There is also quarterly maintenance when we provide software and security updates, and that's a very straightforward process.

We have no plans at this time to increase our usage of Nasuni, but the potential is always there. It really has served its purpose in our particular use case scenario.

Over the later years, I would definitely give their tech support a nine or a 10 out 10, as they've been responsive. Early on, when we were implementing, it was a little bit of a challenge, but in recent years, which is what matters, they have been excellent.

We didn't use a solution before Nasuni. We just had a legacy file system, legacy Windows Servers on a standard network.

The initial setup was straightforward, but we had the assistance of a product specialist that they assigned. They held our hand through the whole implementation process. It could have been complex, but the product specialist came out and gathered our requirements and made the whole process very straightforward. They walked us through the whole implementation process, including how to set a filer up and the proper way to configure our file system for our scenario.

The configuration portion was very straightforward. After shipping out the filers to each of the locations and getting the hardware set up, the configuration process took just a few days. But the process took a bit of time because we were transferring large amounts of data from our legacy systems over to Nasuni. That wasn't really a Nasuni issue, it was a bandwidth issue with the amount of data that had to be transferred. That ended up taking closer to a month but through no fault of Nasuni.

Our implementation strategy was to move all data from the legacy system over to the Nasuni system. We then had to train all of our technicians on how to use that system. It was a straight cut-over from legacy to Nasuni.

Licensing for the data is something that is handled on a yearly basis. Pricing is calculated per the number of terabytes to be utilized with Nasuni. We're in the 60 terabyte range. We have to keep in mind our cloud storage costs. Although that's unrelated to Nasuni, Nasuni consumes cloud resources.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

The original business unit did do some investigations but I don't know which products they looked at. When Nasuni offered to do a pilot, they ran through a pilot with it. I don't think the other vendors ever got that far with us. Nasuni stood out as soon as the pilot was kicked off.

Get together with a product specialist, as we did, so they can walk you through the process based on your use case scenario. That's what they did when implementing it for us, which made it very easy. There is no way we would have been able to configure this on our own, without that support at the very beginning. It's a completely different type of technology. But they handled it and performed the knowledge transfer very well and it was easy to take over supporting it once it was working.

We haven't really had to use Nasuni's on-demand abilities. We renew our storage capacity once a year for a fixed price. We're not continuously changing that. We have to contact Nasuni and get an estimate on any price increase for additional demand.

We've been running in the same configuration the entire time, but if we had to make any changes it would be very fairly straightforward. It's all done within a central management console that communicates to all the hardware appliances and filers in the cloud.

And while Nasuni has not eliminated on-premises infrastructure for us, because we use hardware filers, it has the potential to do so. We have to have our data in the data center to create that local experience for the end-user. If we were to push those filers up into the cloud, we'd be looking at more latency, perhaps, due to network connections. We're using their hardware appliances by design, as opposed to putting them in the cloud, as we're dealing with very large files.

What I would tell a colleague at another company who has concerns about migration to the cloud and about Nasuni's performance is that Nasuni is straightforward. Once you get migrated over to Nasuni and get your data in place, it's a very easy, very secure process to maintain that data, as opposed to having to run different backup agents for particular servers. I would also say that you've got the unified file system, which allows all users at different locations to see the same data, and that is very difficult to do with a Microsoft system. And the snapshot technology is very reliable and very simple. Once it's configured, you can pretty much set it and forget it, with just some basic monitoring of it.

Overall, it has been straightforward and we're very pleased with the Nasuni system. I would definitely give it a high rating.

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. 

It replaced multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system. It was important to have data in a central location where the information could be monitored, maintained, and audited. We needed a single point of reference for the data. We needed it in one central location to be able to replicate it to the cloud. Rather than having data spread out all over the place, we wanted it in one place so that everybody has one place to go and get it.

In terms of simplicity of management, previous processes had no management in place. However, Nasuni was very easy to set up and manage. Integrations with Active Directory made it even simpler. It is very easy to manage.

It is very easy to make changes to the system for organizational changes. It is easy to set up new shares, and it is easy to configure who has access to those shares. It is also easy to do some of the replications that are needed with the system. There are some things that are not easy to set up, but that's a specific use case for us. It is not necessarily what most people do.

We use Nasuni's Continuous File Versioning feature. If somebody accidentally deletes something, we have version history available for the file system. So, if somebody were to accidentally go out there and make a change to the wrong document, or go out there and actually delete the document, we have multiple versions of that file that we can recover from to restore it, which is good. So, there is some type of disaster recovery. 

We're saving manpower and man hours. People don't have to do so much individual-task work and side work. They can use this system. It is all connected to our network. It makes everything more efficient. Our workflows are more efficient. It saves our company probably six hours a week with all combined employees.

Its dependability and auditing capabilities are very important to us to be able to maintain a chain of custody of the information.

Its file-sharing capabilities via a web portal are huge to us.

Its interface design or the graphic user interface design can be slightly tweaked in some areas. Some built-in setup wizards would be very beneficial. Rather than having to go in and configure it by hand, there should be more setup wizards for onboarding new data shares and getting it set up the way you want. I don't know if these are on their roadmap, but I sat down and talked to them about some of the work concerns, some of the things that we liked, and some of the things that we didn't like. They are probably working on that.

I have been using this solution for about a year and a half.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability. In a year and a half, we've had one downtime. You can't give it a 100%, but it is 99.99999%. The way we've implemented it and have it running, it works. It is rarely down. Its uptime is wonderful.

We haven't really had to scale it, so that doesn't really apply to us, but I know the inherent operation of the system, and it is scalable to as big as you want it to go. Our environment is of a hundred terabytes. We have projected to increase its usage within the next five years.

Their support system is helpful and gets the job done, which is important to us. We haven't had to really use their support system because the system is just working the way it was designed, which is good for us.

Its initial setup was very complex. We are using Nasuni in a non-standard implementation. We are not using Nasuni the way it was designed to work out of the box. We decided to go with Nasuni because there was no solution on the market to do what we were trying to do. So, we worked and partnered with Nasuni to build a solution that fits our custom needs and the needs of many other companies, should they decide to go the same route.

Its deployment took two months. It was a pilot implementation. We had designed the system from the beginning and then implemented it. There was no real time frame or deadline. 

The Nasuni team was there for implementation. They were very knowledgeable of their product and of things that we needed answers to that were not their project. Their team that helped us implement was awesome. In particular, they had one guy with whom we worked. He just knew everything and was very smart when it came to software programming that was required on our side to implement the system. He was critical to the project's success. I called him a Wizard because he was very good with PowerShell commands. If we didn't have Nasuni's team working with us, it would have taken us a lot longer.

Their support during and after deployment was definitely a 10 star because they maintained contact with us. After we got everything deployed, they were available for answers and information to make sure everything was working. The system needed an update or something like that or had a couple of errors, and we reached out to them, and within 48 hours, they answered back on whether it was a concern or why it was happening. From the start to the fix, the whole thing took less than 48 hours. After we wrapped the project up and called it done, we haven't had to really use their support system because the system is just working the way it was designed.

We have slightly seen an ROI. We're not having to micromanage multiple data locations because it is all centrally located, so we don't have to buy that product anymore or that material anymore. For our use case, we had slight cost savings to hardware since implementing the system, but the amount of money that it is saving us time-wise is huge. That's the main reason we went with the solution. We can make everything more efficient.

I would not say it is economically priced, but it is affordable. If you can afford to pay for it, it is worth the money, but it is definitely not overpriced. It is priced about where it needs to be in the market. 

We were satisfied with the way they did their licensing and how they handled it. I believe they actually license by data size. It is based on how much data is being held on the machine and replicated, and that's completely understandable. So, for us, their pricing was as expected and affordable.

There are additional costs depending on how you set it up. If you want to host an on-premise solution, you've got to have the hardware to do that. If you deploy their solution in the cloud, you're going to pay more for it. If you host in your own personal cloud, there are costs associated with that.

I can't remember the name of the other company, but basically, we went to a test environment to try to set up the solution, but the company could not get it to do as we wanted it to do. So, we had to cancel the project with that company and find a different company.

To someone who has concerns about migration to the cloud and about Nasuni's performance in that area, I would say that there is no worry at all about using it. Nasuni's software does data replication. So, it takes the data that's on-premise and replicates it to another server or to the cloud. If you want an offsite backup and a stable solution that is affordable, you would have no worry whatsoever. This would be a highly recommended product to do that because that's what it is designed to do.

I would advise making sure that you've got everything planned out of what you want to move. Have a good project plan, and at the beginning, have all the data on the table of what you want to move to the cloud or what data you want to replicate from one point to another. As you set the system up, it is easy to go through and add more data entry points into that replication process, but it would be better to have that at the beginning and get it all set up from the beginning.

It can provide file storage capacity anywhere it is needed, on-demand and without limits, but we are not using Nasuni in that capacity. We have also not used Nasuni to provide file storage capacity for VDI environments.

It has not helped us in eliminating on-premises infrastructure. It has eased our concerns related to data recovery, but it has not affected our IT operation. We specifically put a certain type of data into the system that we knew that we could not lose, and we needed it replicated. The system has so far been doing an awesome job and working as advertised. We have things in place, and with other solution providers and whatnot, this one had to live in its own environment. Nasuni gave us its own environment where it could be replicated, but it has not affected our concerns about timely backups and restores or other areas of IT.

I'd have to give it a 10 out of 10 because we haven't had any issues, and the amount of technological experience and expertise that they brought to the table in our project was amazing. 

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.

Nasuni offers us file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits. We have not had any issues on the filers where we run out of cache space rapidly. This is important to us, especially at our remote offices where we are running virtual to filers. It's nice to know that there is enough storage there for end-users to download or cache as many files as they want, without filling up the filer and data being removed from the cache.

This product gives us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data. I can look at all of our data and I have the ability to recover all of our data from a single console. Navigating our data is fairly simplistic and as far as the end-users are involved, it's nice to know that they can share data across multiple filers.

Nasuni has not eliminated our need for on-premises infrastructure, but it has certainly reduced it. Our whole NAS environment is much simpler and easier as far as updating and upgrading OS versions of Nasuni. The main point is that the ease of use of the product is great.

The most valuable feature is that we have redundancy in our data. It's nice to know that it is cached both locally on the filters, as well as stored on that cloud.

We take snapshots every 15 minutes and it's nice to know that we have many versions of our data backed up.

Nasuni recently implemented a health system for filers. However, it needs better visibility because it lacks data and an explanation, or reasoning as to why a particular filer may be unhealthy. Similarly, when we receive an error on a snapshot, a little more detail as to what failed in the snapshot, and why, would be helpful. Essentially, on the learning side, there is some room for improvement.

We began using Nasuni in the spring of 2017, just over four years ago.

This solution is very stable. Knock on wood, I don't think we've ever had any particular issues with our physical filer or with the virtual filers, and we've never really had any failures with our data not being available.

With respect to scaling, it's very easy to increase or decrease as you like. We are a construction company and we do have a couple of Nasuni desktop-size filers that we have deployed to job sites a couple of times. When they are done with the job site, we've decommissioned the filers and implemented them at other job sites.

Overall, it's very easy to scale. We currently have seven filers and our license is set at 25 terabytes. This is something that I do see increasing because right now, we're at 23. When our license next renews, which may be in December, we may decide to increase it by five or ten terabytes. I don't foresee us increasing the number of filers, although that could always change.

I work with the support fairly often and for the most part, it's pretty good. I have had a couple of instances where the technicians were not very reliable as far as waiting for them to get back to me. However, I won't say that they weren't helpful.

Overall, rating from a one to ten, I'd give them an eight or nine. Some of the technicians could be more responsive, which is an area for improvement in this regard.

In our environment, Nasuni has helped to replace multiple servers with a single global file system. Our old environment consisted of between nine and twelve servers, and now we're down to seven. The number has not drastically decreased but it is a lot simpler to use.

Our previous environment was an HP LeftHand solution, and when I started with the company, I knew nothing about it. I was learning on the fly. It worked, but it was very difficult to update to the latest OS version. Or, if I had to implement new firmware or things like that, it was a lot more difficult.

The primary reason we switched from our previous NAS environment was that it was five or six years old. It was somewhat difficult to manage, especially when it came to updating the hardware and the software, et cetera. Nasuni just makes the whole process easier. Updating the actual virtual and physical server or filer is basically a one-click operation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I worked with a Nasuni technician on the initial setup and it was very clear when it came to moving our data from the existing NAS environment to the Nasuni environment.

The time it took for the actual setup of the filers was pretty short, but getting all of the data into the Nasuni environment took longer. That depended solely on our side, as we needed to work with all of our departments to get their data transferred over. In total, it probably took us between three and four months to complete. The bulk of this had nothing to do with Nasuni.

The strategy was simply to get off of our old NAS environment and get all of our department data moved over to Nasuni. At that point, we also had it stored in the cloud.

There are two of us who maintain the environment, although it is primarily me. I have a coworker that will help occasionally when it comes to updating the filers in the environment. However, it is mainly me who takes care of it.

My manager at the time was the one who selected Nasuni and I wasn't part of the group that was selecting new environments or new products at the time. That was in the initial stages of my employment at the company.

That said, I don't remember us looking at a lot of other vendors when we were seeking to replace our NAS environment.

We are currently running Nasuni version 9.0.7 and are waiting to upgrade to version 9.3.3. It's available, we just have not upgraded yet.

If I had a colleague in another company who had concerns about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance in that area, I would tell them that the migration from our NAS environment to Nasuni was quite simple. I used Robocopy to copy our data from the existing environment to Nasuni and it worked well. It was just a matter of copying the data to our physical filer and then it would automatically take snapshots and send them to the cloud. For me, overall, it was quite simple.

When we first started, they had a different migration tool and I don't think it worked as well as we wanted it to. They may now have a new tool that works better than Robocopy.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it works great. It does what we need it to do and the process of administering it is very simple through the Nasuni Management Console. I would recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

Nasuni has helped to replace multiple data silos with a single global file system. Through digital transformation, Nasuni has helped us centralize and then normalize one solution for all, rather than having silos everywhere. This is important primarily when it comes to information security. This is my concern because I'm the global business information security officer for the company. Nasuni provides us and our clients with some assurance that we can secure the data properly, in addition to having resiliency.

This product provides a single platform with a 360-degree view of our data, which is important to us because, with all of the regulations introduced in the world, such as GDPR, we need visibility of the data. Nowadays, one of the most important things is having visibility of your data and being able to classify it properly. You need to be able to secure it. You also need to know exactly where it is because regulators and clients have the option to audit us if they decide. Without knowledge of where our data is, we can easily fall victim to a hacker or have issues with regulators. 

Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere it's needed, on-demand, and without limits, although it's subject to licensing.

With the help of Nasuni, we have been able to reduce our on-premises infrastructure. This includes both virtual and physical infrastructure. We have been able to do so because it consolidates storage into one appliance, which is connected to the cloud.

The most valuable feature is that it provides single-point connectivity to our cloud storage and at the same time, it helps to keep our data secure.

Nasuni is fairly simple to manage and there haven't been many issues with it. In comparison to any other solutions that we are using, it was a big difference. It is significantly better than our previous solutions, in terms of providing a simple, high-level overview.

We use Nasuni's continuous file versioning feature and it fully protects us. With the ability to version files and have continuous recovery, it helps in terms of resiliency. If we have an incident then we would be able to easily recover from it by using the technology.

If a user accidentally deletes a file or one becomes corrupted, the continuous file versioning allows us to easily recover it. It has significantly improved our ability to recover files and in that space, it has helped us to improve our restorative IT operations. We have been able to take away legacy solutions and bring backups to the next level.

We would like to have a user desktop agent to help improve the end-user experience. They had a legacy agent but do not currently have the capability. This is something that we have been working with Nasuni on and are looking forward to.

We have been using Nasuni for between five and seven years.

We use it quite extensively, globally within the organization, and stability-wise, we have not had many problems. The earlier versions did present some issues but as new updates were released, it was improved and all of the issues were rectified. 

The solution is highly scalable.

The technology is easy to deploy. It's easy to scale in terms of connecting all of the Nasuni Cloud Gateways. It's self-explanatory.

Nasuni as a supplier is pretty responsive and provides us with all of the support we need. They have helped to resolve any issues that were occurring, pretty quickly.

There have been small shortcomings with support so it isn't perfect, although I don't think that any supplier I have dealt with has support that I would rate a ten out of ten. Ours involved the crossing of timezones.

Prior to this solution, between five and ten years ago, everyone was using physical appliances including physical servers. Everyone started shifting to the cloud and as we began to do the same, we found that Nasuni was the ideal solution.

We came up with a cloud-first strategy and started moving to the Cloud. With this, and because of our security and compliance requirements, it was the solution to implement at the time. This is why we chose it.

Implementing Nasuni was quite easy and it was not difficult to make the transition from our previous system. There were some challenges initially but they were resolved. We still work with Nasuni if there are any problems, but we don't have very many issues.

Overall, the implementation was quite straightforward and it was completed in a couple of months. Our strategy included migrating a lot of data to the cloud and it took a while because of the upload speeds.

The implementation was done in-house. We had the entire operations team involved. The executive technology people were involved as well, working with Nasuni. It was a sizable group of people involved in the implementation. 

We evaluated other options prior to implementing Nasuni. As the CSO, I can't speak to all of the reasons that we chose it. However, from a security point of view, it was the best solution at the time.

If one of my colleagues at another company had concerns about the migration to the cloud and the solution's performance then I would say that each solution has its own challenges. With Nasuni, it was quite smooth for us. There were some teething issues but that was at the beginning. When we first started with Nasuni, it was a very new product and we had some problems. At this stage, I am very confident that it wouldn't be a problem to migrate to the platform and use it.

In summary, this is a good product but there are still aspects that can be developed. An example is the desktop agent for users. Things can always be improved and made a little bit better.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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

Using Nasuni enables us to provide file storage capacity anywhere and on-demand, without limits, which is important to us because we're quite a distributed company and we have lots of different remote locations. We don't have enough storage to have a server on each site, so it's really beneficial that we have easily accessible, centralized storage. The bottom line is that it's easy for us to support lots of different remote users in one simple solution.

Nasuni gives us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our data, which is important so that we know the size of our estate and the amount of data that we hold. As a construction company, we have to retain data for 10 years, or sometimes more. This means that having a central platform that can control our data and ensure that it is intact, is extremely valuable for the way we do business.

Although we are using Nasuni in a cloud environment, it has not really affected the costs of our on-premises infrastructure. This is because we were relatively ahead of the curve, so our previous file solution was already in the cloud. However, it was just more complicated with multiple servers. They were Windows Servers that had to be managed by us. These have been reduced into two single devices but there is no change in terms of on-premises hardware.

The most valuable feature is the simplicity of the backup and restore functions.

The performance is good for everything from the backups to the file copies, to the mobility.

We use the continuous versioning feature and although we have not had to recover from a disaster, it has given us the confidence that if something like a ransomware incident should occur, we have the ability to restore to a previous safe version. We are also confident that we would have the technical solution and support to ensure that we do not have a bad experience or a negative impact on our business.

One thing to consider is that Nasuni will have the same limitations that a traditional file storage solution will have, although that is because they are taking the place of a traditional architectural model. For example, Office 365 supports collaboration on documents such as Excel files and Word documents, but because Nasuni is a traditional file server, in that sense, it can't make use of that functionality.

I have been working with Nasuni for just over one year.

We have had no problems in terms of stability or availability.

The limitations to accessing file data in our environment are related to our networking, and it's not something that can necessarily be overcome when we have sites that are on 3G or 4G connections, that do not warrant having on-premises hardware. When those networks go down, that's where we will face limitations, but we've never had any limitations with regards to Nasuni itself. 

With respect to being able to support organizational changes, it is very quick to expand and support new parts of our business. The infrastructure is already there and it's scalable. This means that creating new business units and storage for those business units is really quite simple, especially once you've documented the very few basic steps that you need to take to create a new file storage unit.

Being a construction company, I'm always told that our two biggest technical requirements are print and file. File is one of the biggest and most important technologies without our business and in that capacity, Nasuni is being used every day by everyone throughout the business.

At this point, we are fully using it for all of our data storage and as our data requirements grow, the data we input into Nasuni will grow.

In general, they have done a very good job of architecting the product, designing for scalability, and educating customers on how you can scale. To this end, I can't foresee any way that they could improve what they currently do.

My experience with support was very positive. I had 24/7 support and there were moments when I had to contact them out of hours. The only negative experience when contacting out of hours was that they had a call handler, who wasn't able to put you straight through to a technical person. You had to wait for a call back before you can get support.

Overall, I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Prior to Nasuni, we had a traditional file server set up, and it included multiple servers. With Nasuni, it brings it all together into one solution. This consolidation helped to reduce and move some of the management overhead.

Compared to what we did before implementing Nasuni, it reduces the vast majority of management. With our traditional server, we had to do updates, including Windows updates, hardware repairs, and regular maintenance. We had to be concerned about running out of storage space and thus had to plan ahead to increase or replace hard drives or storage. We would also have to factor in other things such as an operating system upgrade, from Windows 2016 to Windows 2019. With Nasuni, we don't have to consider any of those management overheads. It's all self-contained in the way it's run and managed.

If our previous solution was managed well, backups and restores can be relatively smooth and simple, although that involves a fair amount of management. With Nasuni having such a powerful backup and restore functionality, we find all of the positives of an advanced backup and restore solution, but with very few of the management overhead negatives.

Continuous versioning helps to provide a good experience for our users in cases where they lose files or something becomes corrupted. Lots of users don't want or don't need to understand the technicalities behind the scenes. All they know is that if something gets deleted or just disappears, they want it returned. The value for us is really felt by IT in this case, when we can return those files to users confidently and quickly. That's where the real value comes in for us.

The initial setup was very simple. We had lots of support directly from Nasuni.

Our deployment took approximately a month and a half to complete. The process began with building the infrastructure and then implementing it in the IT department. From there, our strategy was to start with the smaller departments and ramp up to the bigger departments with larger existing data storage requirements.

Our in-house team was responsible for the implementation.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment. The old file infrastructure took lots of human intervention to maintain and expand and repair. One way that we've experienced a return on investment is that we haven't needed to hire additional staff. Furthermore, the current staff has been able to focus on different areas of the business.

I was not involved in the product investigation stage and am not aware of what other products were evaluated.

Nasuni appears to be constantly releasing new features or new functionality which, although at this point we don't use, gives us a potential in the future to expand or improve our offering to the business.

If I had a colleague at another company that was concerned about migration to the cloud and Nasuni's performance, I would tell them that if they're happy with the architecture, being a traditional file server type of design, then I would fully endorse Nasuni as a product. In particular, for the ease of migration and the performance thereafter. 

We have definitely gained insight from using Nasuni. For example, understanding how big our estate is in terms of data is something that we didn't accurately know before. We also have insights into how quickly the data we store is growing.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Nasuni would be that if you're currently using the traditional file server architecture, then this is definitely an improvement and reduces a lot of the complexities. If you are looking for a future-proof file storage solution, then you would need to consider things around how the new cloud files are being accessed or modified. For example, SharePoint, Google Docs, and Amazon WorkDocs are examples of things that require a different architecture.

Overall, our experience with Nasuni has been positive and it is difficult to say where it is that they can improve.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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

We used to have different storage platforms for different regions, but using Nasuni we can actually use one storage platform for our customers who are at different locations so that they can share data. We now have a single global file system. That is really important from both the financial and the maintenance perspectives. We don't need to engage multiple engineers when things are done by a single product.

And the Continuous File Versioning has enabled us to meet our SLAs with our customers. We can deploy snapshots as frequently as we want to match our SLAs.

Continuous File Versioning is one of the best features because it helps you to restore at any point in time. That means you don't have to worry about a ransomware attack. Even if that attack happens, you can restore all the data to five minutes ago and save everything. That restore feature is the most valuable. You can restore in seconds. 

Also, the ability for sharing between multiple regions is important.

Nasuni is not SOC 2 compliant and it needs to be.

Another issue, because it's a cache-based mechanism in the cloud, is that while it keeps some files in cache and some files in the cloud, it doesn't tell which files are in the cache.

In addition, there is no reporting feature available, so we have to generate manual reports of the folder utilization.

It also doesn't have monitoring solutions. They want to do the monitoring of Nasuni using TIV stack, but implementing that takes a lot of time. For every single new filer, I have to deploy the alerting dashboard.

I've been using Nasuni for six months.

The stability is good. I have not seen any issues with its stability.

It's scalable but it's not easy to scale. It's not that simple to manage because it involves size-wise expansion. If we have to add more customers, we have to deploy more filers and that takes time and is not that simple to do. You will end up having some overloaded filers and some filers without load. The scaling process is not good and they don't have any tools to help us scale, so it's trial and error.

It takes at least an hour or so to deploy a new filer, which is a really bad thing. Because it's on the cloud, you should be able to do it in five minutes, but that doesn't happen with Nasuni.

We are currently using it extensively. We have about 20 appliances and we are planning to deploy 10 more in the future.

Customer support is good. Priority-two tickets and lower are handled by customer support via email. I have only had to use the email support so far.

Positive

We were using ZFS Storage but we replaced it with Nasuni. We switched because of the capacity constraints. We needed more capacity and there was a limitation with the ZFS Storage.

It is difficult to configure Nasuni. Adding a filer is an easy task, but deciding where to add them, how many to add, and what size to add takes a lot of time. I have to analyze my existing storage to understand how many users are going to access which folders. I have to design the Nasuni architecture accordingly.

The initial deployment took four to five hours.

I had to deploy multiple Nasuni edge appliances onto the cloud, in the different regions, and then join them with Azure Blob Storage.

We deployed it with the help of Nasuni employees.

We have only had Nasuni for six months so I cannot say that I have seen any cost savings. Even if it doesn't necessarily cost that much, the Azure Ultra Disks are costly.

Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low.

We evaluated SoftNAS and Azure NetApp Files before opting for Nasuni.

The advantages of Nasuni are the cost and better restore capabilities when compared to the other products. The drawbacks of it are the implementation and designing of the architecture. 

If you don't have multiple users or if performance is not a key for your deployment, go for Nasuni storage. In those circumstances it is good. But if you need performance with less latency, you should go with another solution.