This week has seen announcements from two companies I’ve been interested in and following for some time.
Nasuni makes a storage appliance that stores all of a customer’s data in “the cloud”. It’s available either as a physical device (effectively a server running their software) or as a virtual machine. What makes their product interesting is that both the data and filer configuration reside on the cloud and can be reconstituted anywhere if for some reason the filer is lost (for example if the appliance is down or power was lost). The only piece of data the customer needs to retain are the encryption keys to re-enable a new image of the filer. A physical filer can even be reconstituted into a virtual one. There’s a lot more to the product than this and I have it on long term trial in the lab (so expect a fuller review soon), however this week’s announcement relates to enhancements that bring block (in the form of iSCSI) to their existing file offering. What this means is a branch office could host both file data and store data on (say) virtual machines sitting on a Nasuni iSCSI LUN datastore.