Nusani Looks To All-Flash For Better Performance
A recent major improvement in technology in regard to all-flash storage cloud has more companies looking at this option. Nasuni Corp. has announced the launch of its new cloud storage controller with flash storage. Nasuni also publicized and released a new VM (virtual machine) that works on Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure.
The servers offered by Nasuni are the NF-600 and NF-600H which are entirely flash SSD (solid state drive) machines. The NF-440 server is an HA (hybrid appliance, also known as hybrid flash array) that consists of SSDs and spinning disks. The deployment of SSDs was already a big accomplishment for Nasuni considering their customers’ needs. Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni, said, “Our customers have been telling us that they want to put Nasuni in their corporate data center and, with SSD and HA, they can do so with confidence.”
However, Nasuni does not sell their cloud storage controllers as individual devices but rather they are used by their customers to gain entry to the service. These customers install the controllers on site, cache the recurrent files, and then direct the less retrieved data to the cloud. For back end storage, Nasuni manages the cloud storage via Azure or Amazon S3.
The performance measures have also seen a sizable increase. Currently, the NF-600 server contains twenty four 400GB SSDs with roughly 8TB of cache size while the NF-440 includes 11 or 22TB of cache size. Connor Fee, Director of Marketing for Nasuni, noted, “From a hardware perspective, this puts us on par with, if not ahead of, Microsoft StorSimple and Panzura. You use hardware where performance matters. We improved write cache with SSD to get a major boost in performance. Think of it like a Formula One car (referring to the all flash version). It goes ridiculously fast.”
In addition, Fee provided an example of clients who stream data back and forth to the cloud and peform regular indexing. “Lawyers always want to index data in the volumes, and to do that means you’re streaming all data back and forth to local controllers. That’s a lot of data to send back and forth in your pipeline. This way they can deploy [an] indexing file on EC2.”
Nusani has just reported record growth for Q3 of 2013 and there is no sign of slowing down.
