Nasuni: Gateway To The Storage Cloud
Company:
Headquarters: Natick, Mass.
Technology Sector: Storage
Key Product: Nasuni Filer virtual NAS file server
Year Founded: 2009
Number of Channel Partners: Just starting to work on reseller partners
Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-Focused Solution Provider
Why You Should Care: Nasuni's cloud storage gateway will let solution providers offer an interface to existing storage clouds that includes the key storage services, all for a simple monthly fee.
The Lowdown: Storage startup Nasuni wants to make public storage clouds available to midmarket customers with the company's virtual NAS appliance.
The Nasuni Filer, expected to ship in May, helps solution providers take advantage of existing public storage clouds, including Amazon S3 and Nirvanix initially, to offer Storage-as-a-Service to customers, said CEO Andres Rodriguez.
The Nasuni Filer is a virtual appliance that links through the Internet to one or more third-party clouds for backing up and archiving files while providing local copies for fast access. Changes to the files are also copied to the cloud to maintain up-to-date versions.
When configured, the Nasuni Filer allows remote and local caching of files, along with such services as thin provisioning and built-in snapshots to eliminate the need to back up data, Rodriguez said.
The next version will also include the ability to mirror across two different cloud providers, Rodriguez said. "I do not believe this is necessary," he said. "It's for customers who are really, really paranoid about their data."
Customers pay $250 per month for one virtual Filer regardless of how much capacity or how many users the customer has. Customers then separately pay for the capacity used in the public storage clouds, which can be as low as 5 cents per GB per month. One Filer can be connected to multiple clouds for redundancy, Rodriguez said.
Nasuni is targeting solution providers that are looking for a way to help customers offer Storage-as-a-Service. The appliance currently works in VMware virtual environments, and a version for Hyper-V is coming soon, Rodriguez said.