Nasuni Receives Patent For Multi-Site Access To Global Fileshare In The Cloud

NATICK, Mass., April 1, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Nasuni^®, a provider of enterprise storage to distributed organizations, today announced that the U.S. Patent Office has awarded the company U.S. Patent No. 8,661,063 that covers the ability to connect to a single namespace in the cloud from any number of locations around the world.

This multi-site access technology liberates data from storage hardware, which turns the hardware into access points to the cloud storage. An authoritative copy of the data is stored in the cloud, with cached versions of the most frequently used files also stored locally for fast access. With an authoritative copy in the cloud and a single version stream for shared data, the technology ensures that no data is ever lost due to network issues or confusion over which copy is the correct copy of the data. The technology is built into Nasuni's core component, the UniFS® file system.

This new patent, titled "Versioned file system with sharing," is the second awarded to Nasuni in less than six months. In October, Nasuni was awarded a patent that covers the ability to create a versioned file system from the object-based storage infrastructure used by cloud storage providers. The technology covered by the new patent augments the unlimited file counts and versioning capabilities already present in UniFS® so that it can support a global name space and provide access to data across any number of locations.

Nasuni's revolutionary storage architecture completely transforms the way in which enterprise storage is managed, provisioned and delivered. For example, unlike other cloud-integrated storage models, where the service depends on the data living in one or more pieces of hardware, if a Nasuni Filer in any office is destroyed, no other locations are affected. What's more, as soon as IT installs a new Filer, either as a hardware appliance or a virtual machine (VM), everyone in that office immediately has full access to the global fileshare. There's no need to back up local filers because the data already lives in the cloud, which creates multiple copies of all data stored in multiple physical locations.

UniFS® heralds a new class of scalable file systems that can span across any number of geographic locations. Data streams concurrently from all of an enterprise's locations into the cloud-based file system providing aggregate system performance - in other words, the flow of data is not limited by any single storage controller or network choke point but instead enables every location to interact with the file system simultaneously, something that is not possible with traditional WAN acceleration models. In the Nasuni implementation, communications can be secured over standard Internet connections through the cloud for both management and data flow, greatly simplifying the network topology.

With Nasuni, a ten-person office using a VM and a 1,000-person office using a dedicated hardware appliance both have full access to the complete global fileshare, even if it is many hundreds of terabytes in size thanks to UniFS' unique caching of both data and metadata. The system can handle tens or hundreds of locations with the same level of ease and performance. 

"The hardware-centric model of data storage is coming to an end," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. "In the new model, data no longer lives in the storage controller. It lives in the cloud and is replicated back to any device where it is needed. The cloud offers a scalable backbone for replication services at a price point that is unlike anything we have ever seen in storage. It is the ideal storage platform to deliver global access to data."

Ixia, a leading provider of comprehensive network visibility, security and test solutions, is a good example of how Nasuni's UniFS and multi-site access capabilities can free data from local hardware, reduce costs and improve productivity. Ixia's business is globally distributed with 23 locations in 15 countries. Their biggest storage challenge was provisioning storage at new offices gained through acquisition and sharing data between contract manufacturing partners, a globally distributed group that needed to be able to build and test Ixia products. Ixia needed a simple way to share information between multiple contractors and their own engineers, without spending IT man hours on tactical storage and file sharing functions.

With Nasuni, Ixia can set up a Nasuni filer with each partner or new office, delivering fast access to the global fileshare, with all storage provisioned and managed centrally by Ixia through the Nasuni Management Console. And whenever a new partner needs to come online, provisioning storage is as simple as Ixia installing the appropriate Nasuni Filer and setting up permissions, after which everyone in that new location has storage access. In addition, Ixia can manage all permissions centrally through Active Directory, ensuring that contract manufacturers have access only to the files they need.

In fact, Storage management has become so simple that Ixia's storage team was able to focus on other strategic IT projects.

"As Ixia continues to grow, especially with acquisitions and the associated workloads being added to our IT infrastructure, it's imperative that we have the ability to swiftly bring new offices online," said Mazi Fayazfar, Senior Director, IT at Ixia. "It takes very little time to get an office online with Nasuni and my team is able to leverage a single pane of glass for global management through the NMC, so in addition to being more cost effective, it has made our IT organization more productive. Another differentiator is that even though we're using the cloud, our end users still benefit from local performance thanks to the hybrid nature of the on premise appliance."

To read U.S. Patent No. 8,661,063, please follow the following link.

About Nasuni
Nasuni is an enterprise storage company that provides globally-distributed organizations with a simple, unified storage solution that spans the data center and branch offices. By combining on-premise hardware with cloud storage, Nasuni delivers a secure, all-in-one data storage solution that provides local performance for users, simplified and centralized management for IT, and an easily scalable, complete remote office storage solution for the enterprise.

Nasuni is privately held and based in Natick, Mass. For more information, visit www.nasuni.com.

Social Media Links
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nasuni
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/nasuniThe Nasuni Cloud Storage Blog: http://www.nasuni.com/blog

All company and product names are property of their respective owners.     

For more information, contact:

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140401/NE94767LOGO

SOURCE Nasuni