Nasuni and cloud storage

I had a chance to meet with the CEO from Nasuni yesterday, Andres Rodriguez (@
nasunista), and get a look at what they are doing. Wow Cool stuff. We will work up a cloudscore for them soon but they said all the right things. 

But first let me back up. A few months ago at VTUG's Fall Forward event I got to hear Steve Duplessie (@stevedupe) from ESG talk about the future of storage. One of the things that stuck with me was his idea that virtual storage controllers were the next big storage thing. I didn't quite get it then, some times it takes a little time to roll around my brain before it settles in, but after looking at Nasuni I get it.

Normally storage controllers are tied to the physical storage, but imagine if they were not. Nasuni essentially builds a controller (and NFS,CIFS, iSCSI front end) that is independent to the storage. In fact the back end storage they use now is Amazon S3.

They have a local cache to get rid of the performance concerns but all the storage, replication, backups etc are done with S3. In fact someone used the analogy (and I love analogies) that it is like EMC + Akamai.

They encrypt the data and the customer has the keys so compliance and security should not be a concern. S3 is super reliable when configured correctly and if the on site box crashes you can configure a new virtual one in 15 minutes.

The other interesting thing that they are not doing yet, but probably can, is connect to other types of storage. Imagine, if you had box, amazon, dropbox and local storage all managed through this one virtual controller. Also, since we are making stuff up, that you can scale multiple ones of these together to get super high  performance, only limited by the network connection. With 100Gb Ethernet on the radar that's a pretty good size data pipe. String 10 of these in parallel you could get 1Tb access speeds to unlimited data. Talk about big data....

The other thing that they do that is pretty unique is you pay only for usable storage, not usage, not snapshots or number of users. This makes it really easy to understand the cost. It is literally COST X  USABLESTORAGE.

When comparing costs though you do need to factor in some of the other benefits you get. Disaster recovery is built in. No need to replicate data, or buy extra hardware, you can literally configure a VM appliance in minutes, or have it already running in the second (or third) sites. You get centralized storage in the cloud with data backups for free too. Which saves a lot of compliance headaches and missed tape pickups..

Still working on the math to see if this is cheaper or not than local storage, plus backup licenses and media, plus a hot DR site plus the time to manage it plus the WAN link etc... I'm thinking it will be pretty close.