California-Based Real Estate and Construction Company Uses Nasuni for Storage

Nasuni Corp.,announced that the Lewis Group of Companies has replaced its previous storage infrastructure with Nasuni, which now provides all of Lewis’ 32 locations in California and Nevada with fast access to the corporate file share.

The Lewis Group of Companies, in its 60th year of operation, is a large privately-held real estate development companies. It focuses on developing mixed-use planned communities and residential subdivisions in California and Nevada, as well as building and owning rental communities, shopping centers, and office and industrial parks.

Prior to deploying Nasuni, Lewis used a centralized hub-and-spoke infrastructure to provide files to all employees, no matter where they were located. This worked well within the central office, but for offices further afield, slow access was a constant headache, especially for those with slow LAN links.

Another concern was DR. After a major power failure took the data center offline for two days, IT considered building an offsite DR facility and implementing a backup diesel power supply, but neither of these options was feasible. Nasuni solved both the DR and data access challenges.

“With Nasuni, all of our employees enjoy fast access to all files in the company file share, and aside from deploying a Nasuni Filer in each office, which was easy, we didn’t have to build out any additional infrastructure,” said Michael Viselli, IS project manager, Lewis.

Plus, Nasuni took care of DR. With Nasuni, Lewis can store an infinite amount of snapshots of the storage infrastructure, taken as often as every five minutes, and they are stored in multiple physical locations within the cloud. Viselli can recover a file of any size from any time to any place within his infrastructure in seconds. In fact, this capability helped his organization recover much more rapidly from a cryptolocker virus attack than it would have ever been able to do without Nasuni.

“An employee’s computer was infected in June of 2014,” Viselli said: “and after she reported something strange, we scanned the network to see how far it had gone: it got her machine, her directory and a shared volume. We just detached the volumes from the public file share and used Nasuni’s snapshots of our data to restore the volumes back to the moment before she got the infection. It was a real relief to be able to recover so easily from a situation that could be potentially disastrous for many enterprises.“

Finally, Lewis is using Nasuni’s mobile app to give employees access to the corporate file share directly from their iOS mobile devices. Event staff, for example, can take pictures of a party at a property, place them in the Nasuni app, and upload them to the corporate file share, where central office event staff can put them online quickly.

“Nasuni is the next generation of enterprise storage,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO, Nasuni. “We separate the data from the hardware, so our customers don’t have to manage equipment and everyone has fast access to the corporate file share, which is automatically protected and recoverable in an instant. No traditional NAS can do what our NAS in the cloud provides.“

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