Cloud is HOT this year and Nasuni is my first look into cloud storage. Nasuni is a virtual NAS appliance that has some amount of local storage. The Nasuni appliance sits on your local network and serves CIFS and NFS to your users on the front end, and then snapshots the data to one or more Cloud Storage providers of your choice. Cloud providers currently include Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service℠, Nirvanix, Peer 1 Hosting, Rackspace, and Windows Azure
Literally within 10 minutes, I download the ESX VM, started it and had my first cloud share up and running. Started copying images, videos, etc and sharing them to other to test... Fast and flawless.
Nasuni setup was by far they easiest appliance I have ever setup, and when you turn on, it's just on. No boot up, just on!
Nasuni really isn't Cloud Storage, it more of a Cloud Storage Gateway. It's a generic way to setup Cloud Storage to any number of current (an future) Cloud Storage providers. Yes it does CIFS and NFS and stores data on local disk just like all NAS filers, however the main feature is the snapshots to the "Cloud".
How is works is simple; Data is written locally to the appliance, and at set increments, snapsnots of the data are taken and the delta (change blocks) are sent to the cloud. Recovery from any point in time snapshot is also possible... Delete a file, no problem... Go recover it from the snapshot!
I've only had a few hours with this product, and I see lot's of potential here and still lots of questions.
Netapp better incorporate this technology into Ontap fast, or it's going to see some market share loss to this new idea on providing NAS.
Look for updates to the blog as soon as I have a better feel for it...
