Stop Collecting File Servers like Wire Hangers
File servers seem to multiply like rabbits, or more like wire hangers in the closet. Similar to the hangers that you have to buy every time you pay for dry cleaning, general purpose servers often get bought every time more disk space is needed for file services. Data growth keeps outpacing the default file services ‘strategy’ most IT shops have with the simple file server.
Server virtualization does cut down on the accumulation of white box file servers in the data center, but not the growth in virtual machine instances that’s still needed to keep supplying storage capacity for file services. But Nasuni has a better idea.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
As we describe in our lab test drive series for this product, the Nasuni virtual filer downloads as a virtual appliance and installs in a few minutes. Being a NAS device it provides Windows/CIFS file services as a drop-in replacement to any standard Windows server, with NFS on Linux coming early next year. But since the Nasuni filer is connected to the cloud it provides a replacement for ALL your file servers and the capacity they consume. The filer has sophisticated encryption to protect data at rest and in flight and an effective caching algorithm to provide performance on par with the local file servers it’s replacing. But file server sprawl isn’t the only thing that the Nasuni filer addresses.
The Nasuni filer takes snapshots of the file system at regular intervals, then stores these in the cloud. This combination of a fully versioned file system and an effectively unlimited number of snapshots enables the filer to provide a primary storage system with complete data backup and offsite protection built in. The Nasuni filer not only replaces your existing file servers, it replaces the backup and DR systems that protect them as well. Take a look at this webinar “Adding NAS Services to your SAN” for more information.
Eric Slack, Senior Analyst
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Nasuni is a client of Storage Switzerland
