Cloud Storage Uptime Guarantee Of 100% From Nasuni

Cloud storage gateway provider Nasuni has launched a service, rather plainly called Data Protection, that guarantees 100 percent, all-day availability for any data its customers stores inside its partners’ clouds.

That sentence is not a printer’s error. There are not many guarantees anywhere, especially in the world of IT, but this is apparently one of them.

The US software company makes Nasuni Filer, which is a virtual NAS file server front end. The on-premise storage controller runs on VMware and links it through the Internet to a tested and approved cloud resource – namely, Amazon S3, Iron Mountain Digital, Nirvanex and Rackspace.

Thus, Nasuni, a small company without its own data centres, does not have to compete with all those big names; instead, it simplifies the process for its customers and feeds its storage business right to them.

Data Transfer With ACL Preservation

The latest release of the Filer includes a native data migration service that can move large data sets to the cloud while preserving a customer’s existing access control lists (ACLs) and permissions,  said Andres Rodriguez, Nasuni’s founder and CEO. An ACL is a list of permissions attached to an object. It specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects.

As of July 18, Nasuni is guaranteeing a 24/7 availability service level agreement for access to all objects it stores in the cloud.

“The new service is backed by the most stringent service level agreement (SLA) ever offered in the storage industry: guaranteed 100 percent uptime,” Rodriguez told eWEEK.

“When it comes to storage as a service, customers demand 100 percent uptime and ironclad security,” he said. “That is exactly what we give them and the SLA formalises our commitment. Our confidence is based on extensive, long-term monitoring of every Nasuni Filer in the field as well as our internal supporting infrastructure. The new Data Protection Service continues our trajectory to simplify storage.”

The service includes the following, according to Rodriguez:

• Data accessible and available 100 percent of the time. Nasuni’s stringent partner selection process for raw cloud storage and its intelligent caching, file system snapshots and proactive issue resolution enable Nasuni to guarantee that customers will always have access to their data, 100 percent of the time, Rodriguez said.
• Completely secure. Nasuni encrypts all data prior to forwarding to the cloud using AES-256 encryption, the strongest standard now available.
• Disaster recovery at the click of a button. Ranging from accidentally deleted files to the loss of an entire file system, Nasuni guarantees that complete recovery is never more than a mouse click and a few minutes away, Rodriguez said.
• Performance on par with a local NAS. Nasuni’s patent-pending caching technology keeps the most frequently accessed files readily available on-site and data stored with the service looks just like a local NAS. Users will not know the difference, Rodriguez said.

“Raw cloud storage lacks performance, security, and any sort of comprehensive account management, and is just as unusable to most businesses as is a commodity hard drive,” Rodriguez said.

“Nasuni is a new-generation storage vendor focused on harnessing the power of raw cloud storage and transforming it into solutions that give businesses the confidence that only a complete storage services network and a 100 percent SLA can provide.”