We’ve written about Nasuni several times here at The Station and on eWEEK, and that’s because it’s both newsy and innovative. We named it as one of 17 promising new-generation storage companies a few months ago, and it’s fulfilling that promise.
Nasuni Filer is a virtual NAS file server/front end that runs on VMware and uses publicly available cloud resources–namely, Amazon S3, Iron Mountain Digital, Nirvanix and Rackspace–to handle primary data cloud storage. It features a familiar-looking Web-based storage file application that anybody familiar with Windows can use to store and retrieve primary files from a cloud provider.
Anyway, the New York-based company this week released version 2.0 of its Nasuni Filer 2.0, which now opens its markets to Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure, as well as private cloud options. And the choices just keep on coming.
“With every new release, we have a two-fold mission: introducing more customers to the cloud and expanding what a file server can do,” CEO Andres Rodriguez, former IT director of the New York Times, told The Station. “Our [version] 1.0, a NAS with unlimited primary storage and integrated backup, was already a strong, innovative foundation, and we’re building from there, pushing the file server to ease even more IT pain.”
Rodriguez also said that Nasuni has simplified file access with Microsoft DFS, enabling uses to set up a DFS namespace and add the desired share from the Filer as a folder target. This new support for Windows Previous Versions, while deploying the Filer snapshots, enables users to restore previous versions of their own files without the assistance of an administrator.
Customers can now use their own cloud credentials with the Nasuni Filer, a convenience for those who have a preexisting account with a cloud provider.
With Nasuni, you never have to buy any storage hardware, although you need a server to run VMware. It is truly a simple-to-use cloud storage service; everything important and difficult happens on the back end.