Nasuni Migrates Terabytes of Customer Primary Storage

Nasuni Corp., an enterprise storage company, can perform cloud to cloud migrations of multiple terabytes of customers’ active primary storage data without impacting their IT operations.

The company delivers enterprise storage services to organizations that require their data to be accessible 100 percent of the time with no data loss. This service brings together primary data storage, offsite disaster recovery, and multi-site access to shared data. Customers are supported by stringent SLA.

Nasuni virtualizes cloud storage and is able to deliver non-disruptive cloud-to-cloud migration in the same manner that traditional storage controllers can virtualize hard drives. The cloud is a component of the solution, which allows to deliver a uniform level of protection and access across any number of sites. Just as no IT manager would ever choose to store critical data on raw hard drives, raw cloud storage is unsuitable for business use. Raw cloud storage compromises security and performance, and can hold customers hostage to the whims of a single provider. Nasuni transforms raw cloud into a reliable, 100 percent available system with capabilities that are either not possible or too costly to implement in a traditional storage array.

Since the company was founded, it knew it would need to contend with large migrations of customers’ data from cloud to cloud non-disruptively. Data would need to remain available at all times and the migration would need to bypass the customers’ network. Early last year, it saw its first real-world application when Iron Mountain, Inc. announced that it was exiting the cloud storage business. Nasuni began immediately to migrate data for every customer using the Iron Mountain service.

Cole Instrument Corporation, an engineering firm, had almost a terabyte of data on Iron Mountain spread across three different volumes. The customer had chosen Iron Mountain because of their brand and because Cole already trusted them for off-site protection of tapes.

Nasuni recommended that Cole move its data to Amazon S3 and soon afterward began the project of copying Cole’s data from Iron Mountain to Amazon S3. Cole and its users continued to use Nasuni’s service while Nasuni seamlessly copied the data with no disruption or impact to Cole’s operations.

"Our users never felt any impact from the migration," said Manuel Garcia, EVP at Cole. "Nasuni’s technical team kept us constantly informed of its progress, and the amount of time I personally had to devote to the process was minimal. I never imagined such a huge undertaking could prove to be so painless."

Since Cole’s migration, Nasuni has implemented a stringent data availability SLA that requires the use of either Amazon S3 or Microsoft Windows Azure. Those customers who wanted to take advantage of the SLA but who were not using one of those two platforms needed to have their data moved, and, since then, Nasuni has augmented its data migration capabilities to allow large scale non-disruptive migrations between its preferred providers in order to ensure quality of service to its customers.

A large energy services company recently consolidated all of its storage under Nasuni’s SLA backed service to take advantage of both the 100 percent availability guarantee and multi-site capabilities. Their data included files for finance, IT, account management and operations that needed to be migrated from legacy cloud providers to one of Nasuni’s providers.

"I never felt a glitch," said the IT manager responsible for primary storage. "It was smoother than I’d have ever thought possible, and our users never knew the difference."

Nasuni moved all of the data from the original cloud provider to Amazon S3 using Amazon EC2 so as to avoid overloading the customer’s own network. Per Nasuni’s security model, all data was encrypted at all times; Nasuni never had any visibility into the data. The customer now has over 15 TB of data with Nasuni.

"Now this truly is a ‘set it and forget it’ type of service," said the IT manager. "In addition, thanks to Nasuni’s multi-site capability, our users and sister companies no longer need to use a VPN to get access to their data. Not only does this make data access more convenient for our remote users, but it also greatly improved data retrieval when compared to going through a VPN tunnel, as was the case before."

"It doesn’t matter if one is providing storage services or traditional storage," said Rob Mason, president and co-founder at Nasuni. "Ultimately, customers are purchasing a commitment from the vendor to safeguard their data in an imperfect world. To live up to this expectation, enterprise storage services cannot just provide a simple on-ramp to the cloud. At Nasuni, our commitment is to ensure that customers’ data is safe and always available regardless of what happens. The ability to securely migrate data from one cloud to another without disruption is a big part of that equation."