Nasuni Automates Primary, Archive Tiering In Multi-Cloud Environments

Cloud data management technology Nasuni on Monday enhanced its Cloud File Services offering with the ability to automatically determine that data in the cloud should be moved to a lower-cost archiving tier and then actually move it there.

The goal of the new Nasuni Cloud File Services is to reduce management time and costs by managing primary and archive data in such a way that customers reduce or eliminate the need to migrate unstructured data, said Warren Meade, vice president of channel and business development for the Boston-based company.

Customers have used Nasuni as a way to manage global file systems in the cloud for such tasks as global collaboration and synchronization, the data of which has to be kept in a high-performance storage tier, Meade told CRN.

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However, he said, customers also have other files in a cool archive that aren't accessed as much that should be stored on lower tiers in their Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure clouds.

"Now we're putting them together," he said. "If data is inactive, and hasn't been touched in, say, 12 months, it is automatically reclassified as archive data. There's no need to migrate the data. And if the data becomes active again, it's automatically reclassified as primary data."

Meade said the Nasuni Cloud File Service is flexible enough to recognize if data in archive is accidently accessed as a way to prevent it from becoming re-classified as primary data.

"In our dashboard, if it sees data accessed often, it knows it's active," he said.

Nasuni develops physical and virtual gateway appliances that serve active file (NAS) data locally for fast access as a local cache, with the bulk of a customer's data stored on a public cloud such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or IBM Cloud, or on private clouds built using equipment from multiple storage vendors.

The Nasuni technology is offered as a service, on a per-terabyte-per-year basis that allows customers to scale the offering up or down, giving partners an annuity on top of their professional services, Meade said. Customers typically take advantage of under-utilized AWS or Azure licenses to store the data, he said.

The ability to automatically tier and migrate data is a big plus for Nasuni's customers, said Greg Jehs, director of data center solutions at Meridian IT, a Deerfield, Ill.-based solution provider and Nasuni channel partner.

Customers are keeping an exploding amount of data for increasingly long periods of time, Jehs told CRN.

"And many customers don't really keep track of the data on their own," he said. "Especially with data managed by Nasuni in the multi-petabyte level. Customers don't go in and reclassify the data. My company, Meridian, does that for now."

Customer data is growing at an explosive rate, especially as clients adopt IoT or other technology that creates data, Jehs said.

"All that content needs to be stored so customers can make decisions based on that data," he said. "Tools such as Nasuni Cloud File Services are becoming more and more important."