31 July 2010
Saturday
Nasuni enters the fray with Nasuni Filer
By Beth Pariseau | Feb 11, 2010
0 comments
Facebook
LinkedIn
Digg
Email
PrintStartup Nasuni Corp. is putting its Nasuni Filer into public beta today, a product the company says will allow network-attached storage (NAS) customers to get the best of both cloud storage and on-premise data storage by automatically caching active data while bulk data stays with a service provider.
Nasuni is emerging from stealth with founder and CEO Andres Rodriguez (formerly chief technology officer at Archivas, which was bought by Hitachi Data Systems in Feb. 2007) at the helm. Its first product, the Nasuni Filer, is a virtual appliance that runs on VMware. It can be downloaded from the Web and resides in a server at an end user's data center. It offers an interface to cloud data storage services using the CIFS standard file network protocol, rather than requiring customers to provide their own application integration into a Web services-based cloud data storage service.
Meanwhile, the customer can either manage a relationship with one of Nasuni's cloud storage service partners – Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), the Rackspace Cloud, Iron Mountain's cloud data storage services, and Nirvanix Inc.'s Storage Delivery Network – or have its relationship managed by a channel partner.
Rodriguez said Nasuni can offer customers the option of a fixed $250 per month fee for unlimited capacity with one of the cloud service providers if the customer has either Nasuni or one of its channel partners handle the provider relationship, in addition to Nasuni's licensing costs (the company has not publicly disclosed pricing for the product yet).
Once data goes to the Nasuni Filer, the appliance handles the transfer of data to and from the cloud service provider. "There's a natural bridge between the NAS and cloud archiving worlds," Rodriguez said. "Snapshots are that bridge."
The Nasuni Filer treats the cloud as if it's raw disk. It sends it chunks of data based on incremental snapshots of the local file system, which are compressed and encrypted for transfer over the Internet. A copy of the overall file system structure, along with the files and metadata, is also stored in the cloud in case the primary appliance fails. The snapshots are made as soon as hourly or as far apart as 12 hours.
The original files also remain in the local repository for awhile, but files that haven't been recently used will move off to the cloud to make room for active data.
The appliance isn't meant for large enterprises or high-performance data sets, as there's some latency involved in bringing files down from the cloud should there be a "cache miss." Rodriguez said Nasuni is targeting customers with at least 500 GB of total data (at least 100 GB of it file based), with between 200 and 2,000 employees.
Nasuni plans to make the Nasuni Filer generally available this spring, with Version 2.0 coming in the second half of the year. In future releases, Rodriguez said Nasuni will offer the ability to mirror data between cloud data storage back ends at different service providers. An encryption key escrow option with a third party will also be added to later versions of the product. The first version of the Nasuni Filer supports Windows files only, while support for other operating systems remains a roadmap item.
This article originally appeared on SearchStorage.com
