- The Cloud
- Nasuni in General
- The Nasuni Filer
- Performance
- File Protection
The Cloud
What is cloud storage?
Cloud storage is an unlimited and reliable data repository built on the principle that data can be fully protected if it is held redundantly, with the copies being distributed widely among a network of servers. Servers can be replaced when necessary with no loss of data, and the system can be expanded infinitely without any service interruption. Cloud data centers are massive, providing an economy of scale and a level of reliability unattainable by traditional storage solutions. Some clouds hold data in multiple geographic locations as well, for protection against a natural disaster. There are private clouds, owned by enterprise companies, and public ones, which have recently become available to everyone. The new public clouds, while fully functional as repositories, do not yet offer many tools for businesses looking to make effective use of them, so many companies are springing up to serve those who are poised to benefit from the cloud but lack the tools to do so. Nasuni provides all the tools you need to integrate cloud storage with the working life of your business.
Why is cloud storage the best choice now?
For many years, enterprises have been building their own storage clouds, but until recently, the cloud was still unavailable to those without such vast resources. Within the last few years, several large, well-run, reliable commercial clouds have opened themselves up to developers and private users. With such storage facilities available, continuing to struggle with local storage with expensive, hot, high-maintenance hardware is the choice that will not seem sensible for long. Nasuni’s purpose is to make the transition easy. Try Nasuni out on just a portion of your files, and get a jump on the future.
Is cloud storage a viable choice for primary data?
It is now. Nasuni compensates for the shortcomings that have kept cloud providers from being able to deliver primary storage. While the cloud offers unlimited protected storage at a lower cost than businesses can provision on their own, it lacks performance, Local Area Network protocols, such as CIFS or NFS, and the ability to roll back unwanted changes. The Nasuni Filer was designed to address all of these issues with its high-performance cache, full support for CIFS and NFS, Active Directory support, and its snapshot technology.
How do I know the cloud won’t lose my data?
The cloud creates multiple copies of your data and stores them in many separate servers, so if one server fails, your data is safe in several other servers. In the event of a failure, the system automatically generates a new instance of your data in another server so the level of protection is renewed. Our cloud providers have data centers with thousands or in some case, tens of thousands servers, so the chance that all servers will be down at once is virtually zero. Cloud providers can also guarantee that copies of your data will be held in multiple geographic locations. To ensure immediate and long-term data integrity, your data is verified when it’s first committed to the cloud, and a signature is created. Each time a copy is made, the copy is checked against the original signature to make certain the copies are perfect. As for security, your data is encrypted before it leaves your premises, so that it’s completely safe on the way to the cloud. It remains encrypted in the cloud and cannot be violated.
Isn't restore from an off-site location less reliable and too slow?
No. The cloud technology provides much better protection than traditional backup, and, unlike classic backups, you don’t need to test the cloud to make sure it hasn’t failed you. You can look at your files, even all your out-of-date files, at any time, but it’s totally unnecessary. They will be there for you if you need to restore them, and they will come back much faster than restore from offline backup. Traditional backup is notoriously slow. With Nasuni, a restored file system is available within minutes, putting your users back to work right away.
What if the cloud I choose goes out of business?
The clouds we offer meet tough standards for availability and data integrity; they are well-respected, and, in our judgment, here for the long haul. If, by a shift in fortune, one of our partners goes out of business, you will have a chance to move your files to another cloud before it closes up shop. Nasuni keeps your data in a portable form, so there is no vendor lock-in. Because clouds have already become an integral part of the data infrastructure, and daily take on a larger share of the workload, we are confident that there will always be clouds to serve as Nasuni’s storage partners. Nasuni will offer cloud-to-cloud migration services in upcoming releases.
Nasuni in General
Does Nasuni hold my files?
No. The cloud provider holds your files. The Nasuni Filer encrypts your files before they leave the perimeter of your data center, so no one at Nasuni or the cloud can see your files. We also ensure your files are safely delivered to the cloud provider of your choice. Think of Nasuni as your trusted courier. We deliver and retrieve your files reliably, but we do not store them.
How does the cloud know how much storage I need? Do I have to estimate my usage up front?
No. The cloud lets the Filer use as much storage as it needs, when it needs it, without any management from you. It’s all automatic. With Nasuni, as with a utility, you’ll never be charged for more than you use. The Filer, frugal on your behalf, also optimizes your storage consumption, by saving only deltas to the cloud rather than complete versions of revised files, so you won’t overspend in that way, either.
How do I know my data can be accessed only by me?
Data is encrypted by the Nasuni Filer on your premises, using OpenPGP with AES-256, and remains encrypted in the cloud. This guarantees end-to-end data protection. The data is never visible to anyone at Nasuni or the cloud. Customers can choose to escrow their encryption keys with Nasuni or a trusted third party, or to generate and store their own keys.
Will Nasuni and cloud storage save me money?
Yes. The total cost of the Nasuni, including both the fee for the Filer and the cloud storage capacity itself, is considerably less than a comparable investment in local protected storage. With Nasuni, you can expand your existing storage capacity without purchasing additional hardware. Because Nasuni protects your files with snapshots, in conjunction with the redundant architecture of the cloud, there is no need for backup or remote storage, which represents a considerable savings. Your IT staff will also become more productive, since they won’t have to provision more storage or perform regular backups. With Nasuni, everything is included.
Can I save all my data with Nasuni?
Because Nasuni uses caching for local provisioning, the system is perfectly suited to files. Databases and email servers, like Exchange, are not good candidates for this solution. Nasuni will create more capacity in your existing storage system by eliminating the need to store many of your files locally; however, you should continue to use your local storage to host email and databases.
How is Nasuni better for me than provisioning directly from a cloud provider?
The cloud providers, if you go direct, will not automatically manage your capacity for you, or track and save file changes, or ingest your new files efficiently and without effort on your part. They will not snapshot your files ever, let alone at the frequency of your choice. They will not change your working set according to use patterns. We do all that. Plus, we absorb the cost of providers’ read/write and bandwidth access fees so your costs will be consistent and dependent only on capacity.
Can I use more than one cloud at the same time?
Yes, and we make it very easy to do. When you create a new volume in your Nasuni Filer, you select which cloud you would like to send its files to. Regardless of the multiplicity of cloud providers, volume management and access control are centralized in the Nasuni Filer. Our clear billing allows you to track what you are spending where.
Can Nasuni be used with my private cloud?
Yes. As long as your private cloud provider is supported by Nasuni. Simply enter your private cloud credentials during installation or when adding a new volume. Note: Nasuni will only bill you for Nasuni Filer charges and Nasuni provisioned cloud charges, you are responsible for paying all cloud charges for cloud providers you provide.
Can I change clouds at any time, if I want to switch?
Your data is held in a portable format, so you may switch clouds. It’s better to choose wisely at first, however, at least for now. We have a bulk data movement tool in the roadmap, but as of today, it would take quite some time to funnel all your data back through the Nasuni Filer into the new cloud. We advise that before you really get cranking, you consider what services you’ll need on which files, and partition your files accordingly. We make it very easy to create new cloud volumes. You will still get one simple bill, regardless of how many clouds you opt in to, and having multiple clouds will not increase your management burden, because Nasuni handles the flow to the clouds for you and centralizes control in the Filer.
How does Nasuni assess its cloud providers?
We continuously monitor our partners for availability, performance and data integrity. Tests are run from multiple locations in order to eliminate possible locality issues. The system reports any outages to our engineers almost instantaneously, and our solid relationships with our providers allow us to resolve any issues quickly.
Why don’t you have your own data centers?
Given that established players are already doing it well and have given developers access to their data centers, we have decided to focus on a new and pressing problem: How to transition from the classic NAS to a cloud-provisioned file server without having to toss out what was still working about the NAS environment.
The Nasuni Filer
Can I replace my current NAS with a Nasuni Filer and still get all the NAS functionality?
Absolutely. Though the Nasuni Filer does much more than traditional NAS, it retains all the NAS functionality. It’s fully compatible with Windows Shares and Active Directory. Shares are created and access control is managed in a familiar way. You can also consolidate any number of NAS boxes into one Nasuni Filer, which, given the Filer’s unlimited storage capacity and single management interface, will simplify your IT life considerably.
Does Nasuni Filer deduplicate files before sending them to the cloud?
The system is designed so that each time files in the cache are resaved to the cloud, those files are deduped and only the deltas are sent up, so near duplicates do not congest your network bandwidth or swell your capacity and cost in the cloud.
Will Nasuni consume all my bandwidth? Can I throttle its bandwidth usage?
You can throttle its bandwidth, and you will likely want to, so it comes with throttling enabled. The Nasuni Filer is optimized to push your data to the cloud as quickly as possible. Its transfer protocol tries to use all of your available network capacity. While this behavior produces the best transfer speeds, it may inconvenience users who need the network to function for other purposes. Throttling allows you to set a limit on the amount of bandwidth the Nasuni Filer can use at certain times of the day. You can change the settings once you have logged in as the administrator.
What happens if the appliance is damaged or lost?
All you need to do to restore your Filer is log in to your account on the nasuni.com website, download a new image of the Filer, and reinitiate the setup. Nasuni’s setup wizard will recognize that you had a previous Filer configured and will lead you through a simple restore procedure. You’ll need to upload your encryption keys, and that’s it. The Filer will then download the metadata necessary to bring all file systems online, and the system will be operable within minutes—not in hours or days like traditional backup. The Nasuni Filer, being a virtual appliance, will also benefit from additional high-availability schemes already in place in your data center.
What happens when I need to migrate to a new server?
Your virtualization platform provides simple movement tools for migrating virtual machines to new physical servers. Because the Nasuni Filer is a virtual machine, you can use these movement tools to migrate the Filer. Further simplifying matters, the size of the Filer is only the size of its cache and not the size of the complete file set, so finding available space in a new physical server is easier.
Performance
If files are stored off site, how quickly can users access them?
As fast as any locally stored file, thanks to our high-performance cache. With Nasuni, your working set is all held in your local infrastructure, so access speeds for these files will be unchanged. Speeds for a file not in the cache will depend on your Internet connection and your cloud storage provider. Typically, files begin to download in a few seconds. We designed the Nasuni Filer to handle such delays gracefully, so that your applications will not receive errors.
What happens when users make changes to the files in the local cache? Does the cloud track them?
Nasuni tracks them. Any changes users save to files in the local cache are sent to the cloud periodically as snapshots, so the set of files stored remotely is kept up to date. Only the changes are sent, rather than the entire new version of the file, so performance is not affected by the traffic and near duplicates will not proliferate in the cloud. New files are also automatically snapped to the cloud.
Can I increase the size of my local cache?
Yes, the size of the cache is adjustable. It is limited only by the capacity of your local infrastructure.
What is a cloud volume?
A cloud volume is the term for a single file system attached to a cloud, where that file system's data is stored. You can easily create or delete volumes through the Nasuni Filer's simple control interface. With the Filer, you can create multiple volumes attached to same cloud, or you can attach volumes to different clouds in order to control where different data sets reside. You can also set capacity quotas for each volume. All volumes are encrypted by the Nasuni Filer on your premises, and the encryption keys can be held by your business, Nasuni, or escrowed with a third party.
Will I have as much control over my volumes as I do now?
Yes. Nasuni cloud volumes are to cloud storage what traditional volumes are to disk storage (except that cloud volumes never run out of capacity). As with disk storage, only you, the administrator, will have the authority to manage the volumes. No one at Nasuni or the cloud can access your data, because it is encrypted, and user access is controlled by you, using traditional NAS tools. You can easily create and delete cloud volumes and attach them to whichever cloud you choose. They are easier to configure than disk volumes, because each one has a default file system already in it, so there is no need for formatting. Volumes have no capacity limits and automatically expand as your data set increases, so you will never have to reprovision. You can, however, set capacity quotas.
What happens if the Internet is down?
The files in the cache remain available; for files not in the cache, you have to wait until your Internet connection is reestablished. The snapshots, however, continue, and Nasuni reintegrates them into the system in the cloud when the connection is restored.
For architectural or engineering firms, with giant files only accessed once every few months, what would the access speed be like for users?
Customers with large files or large working sets should create a generous local cache in order to avoid performance issues.
Who is responsible if there is a problem?
We are. We are your one-stop shop for all support issues. The Nasuni Filer has been instrumented to provide our support staff with plenty of diagnosis data. We will track down any issues and coordinate your cloud providers. Our technical support staff is here 24/7 to help you.
How fast can I get my files to the cloud the first time?
The speed at which files get to the cloud will depend on the available bandwidth of your Internet connection. Files being brought into the system land in the local cache and are then sent as a snapshot to the cloud. In a first-time bulk migration, the local cache may become full. At that point, the Nasuni Filer will push back on the application, asking it to pace additional writes. All of the well-established migration tools handle this gracefully. If, however, you do a large drag and drop instead of using a migration tool, the client will think the cache is the limit of your capacity and may give you an immediate error message saying that the target disk is not big enough for the move. For your trial, we recommend you start off with a small drag and drop of, say, 10 GB. For a bulk migration, we recommend using a migration tool, such as Robocopy (which comes bundled with some versions of Windows).
File Protection
Can I replace backup/restore with Nasuni?
Yes, for files stored with Nasuni. Backup/restore and disaster recovery are included. The cloud by its nature holds redundant copies of your files all the time, and our snapshotting technology allows you to view and restore any past instance of your system, so together they provide backup and restore. As for disaster recovery, because the cloud holds an up-to-date version of your files in a remote location all the time, and Nasuni can restore it for you to any location in minutes, you are totally covered. Nasuni is designed to be an all-in-one file storage and protection system. Nasuni is not a backup solution for databases or email servers, however. You will need a separate system for them.
How are snapshots better than traditional backup/restore?
Unlike traditional backup, which is notoriously slow, a Nasuni restore is operable instantaneously. While traditional backup is opaque, snapshots are not: They look just like a file system, and you can navigate back in time to view any version of any file. You can restore files separately or as part of a directory or file system. Because snapshots are integrated into the Nasuni Filer, they reliably back up everything in the file system without duplications, omissions, or parent-child errors. With Nasuni, there will never be that nerve-racking moment when you try to restore a file system and discover that errors have been quietly accumulating. You will simply initiate a restore, and your file system will come back complete. Finally, snapshots don’t take up room in your data center, and they are unified with your Nasuni storage solution.
Can I set the frequency of my snapshots?
Yes. Both the frequency and the bandwidth consumed by the snapshots can be defined. Snapshots capture the file system at a single point in time and are taken at regular intervals. To see the simple interface for setting snapshot frequency, refer to the Snapshot Configuration section of our User Guide.
Can I limit the number of snapshots stored in the cloud?
Yes. The Nasuni Filer allows you to set up snapshot retention policies for each volume. You can choose to hold only a certain number of snapshots or keep snapshots for a certain duration of time. All old snapshots beyond the specified period will be deleted from the cloud. The Nasuni Filer defaults to hold the snapshots indefinitely. Due to the Filer’s advanced deduplication and compression, keeping snapshots indefinitely does not increase your storage costs significantly.
After my data is deleted in the cloud, could someone undelete or access my information?
After your data is deleted in the cloud by the Nasuni Filer, no one will be able to undelete or access your files. The files were chunked and encrypted before being sent to the cloud, so no one can access the files before or after they were deleted.
Can Nasuni provide disaster recovery for my files?
It can. Storing your files in the cloud, simply because the cloud is off-site, already provides a level of comfort you don’t have when storing locally. Add Nasuni to the picture and you have a swift recovery system that you can access from any location, provided you have with you your nasuni.com credentials and your encryption keys.