Nasuni File Services 7.5 Enhances Management Capabilities

Nasuni Corp. announced the availability of the File Services version 7.5, featuring significant upgrades to the company’s Management Console, improved support for OS X and key engineering applications, and the ability to side load local filers.

Additionally, individual storage volumes within UniFS, an cloud-native filesystem, have been qualified up to one billion files, with no technical restriction on expanding beyond one billion and no limit on the number of volumes that can be created.

The Management Console offers centralized control over every company’s edge appliance and storage volume, a single pane of glass through which administrators can control the entire storage system. In version 7.5, the company has enhanced the capabilities of the management console with the addition of new search functionalities and improvements to the GUI that display key statistics for each individual edge appliance. The firm has also improved its alerting capabilities, adding granular-level alerts that can notify administrators about load thresholds, quotas, and more, with increased notification functionalities.

Additionally, the company has expanded its support for a number of critical design and engineering applications to enable enterprise users of office, creative, design and engineering applications to collaborate across offices and work more efficiently than ever before. With advanced settings, OS X users can enjoy even faster performance with Microsoft Office applications and with creative, design and marketing applications from Adobe. And with continuous improvements to the global lock service, the firm has been able to provide faster sync times and improved performance for critical engineering applications like ArcGIS and AutoCAD.

The company has also introduced the ability to side load edge appliances for DR preparation or migration to a edge appliance, speeding data transfer and improving performance for end-users. When side loading, active files are pre-populated in the appliance from the old one so when users start accessing their files, they are already in cache, eliminating the need to pull files down from the cloud.

With version 7.5, the company has gone a step further in proving its promise of unlimited scalability. Individual Nasuni volumes in UniFS have been tested and qualified through one billion files, with no current technical restriction or limit on capacity. Firm’s users have no limit on the number of storage volumes they can have.

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“UniFS is a file system for the 21^st century, and in support of that, we strive to enhance its usability, management and scalability with every new release of the Nasuni File Service,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO, Nasuni. “With version 7.5, we have focused on enhancing the user experience and supporting new cloud regions and protocols. With the successful testing of our volumes up to one billion files, we have shown that our commitment to unlimited scalability is more than just words.“

Enterprise engineering design firm scales fast with Nasuni
Burns & McDonnell, a Kansas City-based engineering, architecture, construction, environmental and consulting firm with more than 40 offices in the U.S. and abroad, is experiencing file data growth at a tremendous rate. The firm has added nearly 60TB of file data to Nasuni in the past year alone. Additionally, the firm has industry-specific challenges created by the need to share new, large file types such as those produced by laser scanning technology, and the need to provide access to all project records as both an amenity to clients and for compliance reasons.

Rich Miller, director, IT, Burns & McDonnell, uses File Services to solve both problems. With Nasuni, Miller can provide every office fast access to the files created by laser scanners, while at the same time using the unmatched scalability of the cloud to store the company’s projects, totaling 29TB so far this year. Despite the massive rate of growth, Miller said that storing data with Nasuni only requires one IT team member, enabling him to redeploy staff elsewhere.

“Nasuni’s ability to move large amounts of file data into the cloud and provide simple, easy-to-use management tools has enabled us to store massive amounts of data without having to spend excessively or allocate a burdensome amount of staff,” Miller said. “With Nasuni, not only can we archive all project data, but we can provide fast access to large files from a global file share, something that would be difficult to achieve with our existing hardware. Their deep understanding of the challenges facing our industry has helped them develop a storage technology that feels purpose-built for us.“