GigaOM » nasuni

Amazon takes another step to suck up more enterprise data

Barb Darrow — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:42:50 +0000

Face it, for all the drama around Microsoft’s recent travails, it owns a good chunk of today’s enterprise. I would wager even most Google Apps shop also run Microsoft Office, for example. And then there’s the tons of corporate data living in Windows-centric IT shops– in SQL Server and SharePoint. That’s why Amazon, in its push to draw more enterprise customers, had to make sure the Amazon Storage Gateway will run in Microsoft Hyper-v virtualized shops. Which it now does.

The news, released on the AWS blog, means the year-old storage gateway — a key bridge between in-house company data and Amazon’s cloud — already supported VMware’s popular ESXi hypervisor. As the AWS blog explains, the gateway:

” … combines a software appliance (a virtual machine image that installs in your on-premises IT environment) and Amazon S3 storage. You can use the Storage Gateway to support several different file sharing, backup, and disaster recovery use cases. For example, you can use the Storage Gateway to host your company’s home directory files in Amazon S3 while keeping copies of recently accessed files on-premises for fast access. This minimizes the need to scale your local storage infrastructure.”

If companies are to trust more of their data to a cloud — any cloud — they need to see that pumping their data in and out of it is: a) easy as pie; b) secure. That’s the reason Microsoft snapped up StorSimple last October. And that’s the idea behind such slick services as Nasuni and Panzura. Face it, it’s in Amazon’s best interest to blur the line between in-house data and data that lives in its cloud — and that’s the idea behind the storage gateway.

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Microsoft Azure storage ends the week with a bang — and not in a good way

Barb Darrow — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 23:00:03 +0000

That’s life, as Frank Sinatra once sang. Microsoft Azure Storage was named the world’s best public cloud storage service on Tuesday, then crashes and burns on Friday.

Here are a few of the posts to the Windows Azure status dashboard:

22-Feb-13 · 9:45 PM UTC

Access Control v2, Service Bus, WindowsAzure.com and WebSites services are impacted by Storage service degradation worldwide. We are actively validating the recovery steps to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

22-Feb-13 · 8:44 PM UTC

We are experiencing an issue with Storage Worldwide and this is impacting all dependent services. We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

Folks on Twitter and elsewhere attributed the snafu to the lack of a new SSL certificate. If such a certificate does expire, users cannot authenticate against their various services: No authentication, no access.

Update: As of Saturday morning, this message was posted to the Azure status page — there was no timestamp so it is unclear when it posted. All of the storage areas affected on Friday still showed “service interruption” status.

On Friday, February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Storage experienced a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS traffic due to an expired SSL certificate. This did not impact HTTP traffic. We have executed repair steps to update SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and have recovered to over 99% availability across all sub-regions. We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage service and SSL traffic for the next 24 hrs. Customers may experience intermittent failures during this period. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers

I’ve asked Microsoft for comment and will update this when they do. Whatever the cause of the problem, it’s been an up-and-down week for Windows Azure. On Tuesday, Nasuni, a company that manages cloud storage for business customers, said Windows Azure storage outperformed all four other cloud services — including Amazon S3 — in rigorous performance testing. Despite Azure’s performance, Nasuni said it would stick to S3 as its primary supplier, citing its maturity. Looks like that may have been the right call.

Windows #Azure Blob Storage service is down due certificate issue. Check update at Windows Azure Service Dashboard:
windowsazure.com/en-us/support/…—
Avkash Chauhan (@avkashchauhan) February 22, 2013

Well, as Sinatra sang: “Riding high in April, shot down in May.” Web time just accelerates the process.

This story was updated February 23 at 6:25 a.m. PDT with a newer statement from the Microsoft Azure status page.

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Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses

Barb Darrow — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:01:31 +0000

In a new survey of 1,200 small and medium businesses (SMBs), LogMeIn found — no surprise — that employees in most of stores use personal applications at work. What was more eyebrow-raising was that IT staff in these businesses are accommodating, if not embracing, many of those personal application choices.

LogMeIn, the company behind Cubby, a business-oriented Dropbox competitor, prefers the term Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) to the more common bring your own device (or BYOD) terminology.

Perhaps most surprising is that 39 percent of productivity applications — the word processors and spreadsheets that do the heavy lifting in businesses — were introduced by employees. Google Apps is probably a big beneficiary here.
And, 44 percent of collaboration apps — Skype, GotoMeeting etc. — were brought in by workers, not IT departments.
Twenty-six percent of those productivity and collaborative applications ended up being okayed by IT departments for corporate use.
Sixty-nine percent of “social” applications used across the surveyed businesses were brought in by employees. LogMeIn categorizes things like Yammer and LinkedIn as social apps which indicates a pretty straight-laced view of social apps.
And, more than half (52 percent) of cloud sync-and-storage applications now in use in these businesses likewise came in the door via employees. That would be the Dropboxes, iClouds, Skydrives of the world.

Other key findings:

70 percent of companies surveyed said employees “actively” use non-business applications in a work context.
67 percent of IT pros cited data security of these apps as a primary concern.
47 percent of respondents indicated that BYOA can increase business flexibility
89 percent of IT pros said BYOA will require different skills for managing IT environments.

For this research, LogMeIn and Edge Strategies surveyed more than 1,200 companies with up to 1,000 employees in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zeeland.

These findings, along with earlier research sponsored by Nasuni and others, shows that the line between personal and workplace technologies has become all but invisible. That poses real challenges to IT departments that have to deal with all sorts of technology coming in over the transom. But it also opens up opportunities for vendors that design easy-to-use consumer apps to enter the business realm as well.

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Storage: the crack cocaine of cloud computing

Barb Darrow — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:51:56 +0000

Okay, the analogy is imperfect, but, it is becoming clear that storage is the easiest way to get new customers into a given cloud. And, once they’re there, Amazon, Google, Microsoft can woo them with fancier (and pricier) higher-end services. The thinking is: Get them started with cheap storage, move them to compute and right on up the stack to data warehousing and analysis. Then you really have them hooked.

Microsoft is the latest cloud vendor to cut storage prices — less than a week after Amazon and Google cut prices three times between them — those cuts conveniently timed for the AWS: Reinvent show. Microsoft’s move, which takes effect December 12, cuts Azure storage prices by as much as 28 percent depending on volume, according to a blog post by Steve Martin, general manager of Windows Azure. The company last cut its storage prices 12 percent in March. With this latest cut, all three players are at the $0.095 mark for the first 1TB per month with some options and variability.

The new Microsoft price list:

And here’s the latest from Google, as of November 29. (DRA is a new Durable Reduced Availability storage option that lets users trade some data availability for lower price. Google positions it against Amazon’s reduced redundancy storage.)

And last but certainly not least, here’s the Amazon Web Services’ S3 status quo (also as of November 29.):

Crack analogy is wack

Tier 1 Research analyst Carl Brooks throws a bit of wet blanket on the crack analogy (thanks a lot, Carl) saying that all this price posturing is more about marketing than actual market forces — that few enterprises will be swayed by these incremental changes. But even if it’s PR, news of the cuts — which get wide coverage — might get some companies to look at cloud storage as an option — especially for disaster recovery and backup.

On the other hand, Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni, a storage management service provider, loves all this action because he thinks it will boost cloud storage adoption.

“Cloud storage may be a commodity component but it is by far the stickiest part of the full cloud stack. Once you get companies like Dropbox to put their storage with you, they will be using lots of compute and bandwidth and even applications (analytics, etc) to go with it. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are using storage as their loss leader to get the rest of the value stack,” he said via email.

Netting it out

Nobody’s going to pick up and move their digital stuff from one cloud to another at every price cut, but new customers looking for storage in the sky might be intrigued by these offers. And once they check into a given cloud, these vendors all bet it’ll be hard to quit.

Tier 1′s Brooks thinks we’re not even close to the bottom when it comes to cloud storage pricing, so stay tuned for more action from the big vendors.

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Guess what Mr. CIO? One in five of your employees uses Dropbox at work

Barb Darrow — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 05:01:13 +0000

Note to CIOs: If you don’t think your workers are using Dropbox to store and share business documents, you’ve got another think coming.

One out of five of 1,300 business users surveyed said they use the consumer file-sync-and-share system with work documents, according to new research by Nasuni, an enterprise storage management company. And, half of those Dropbox users do this even though they know it’s against the rules.

The most blatant offenders are near the top of the corporate heap — VPs and directors are most likely to use Dropbox despite the documented risks and despite corporate edicts. C-level and other execs are the people who brought their personal iPads and iPhones into the office in the first place and demanded they be supported.

These findings should not be news to anyone who’s been paying attention. Dropbox, the popular service that consumers use to store and share photos, files and other documents, has become the proxy for “shadow IT” — technology that comes inside a corporation but is beyond the control and tracking of corporate IT departments.

Dropbox claims a whopping 100 million users — and its popularity is driven by the exploding use of smart phones and tablets to send, sync and share documents. This whole bring your own device (BYOD) movement causes huge headaches for corporate IT departments which are supposed to keep company data secure. The problem with many corporate file-share-and-sync solutions, is they aren’t as easy to use as Dropbox and don’t necessarily support personal smartphones or tablets. So if you’re trying to work and need your document, you take the path of least resistance: Dropbox.

Here’s the problem: if corporate workers put sensitive internal files up there, the door is open to abuse. According to the survey:

“The sensitive data stored in Dropbox is not secure and just as importantly, not controlled by IT. This means that if an employee leaves the company, the information that [a] user has stored goes with them, creating a significant risk of data loss or exposure. Furthermore, as the amount of sensitive corporate data stored in Dropbox increases, the online file-sharing service will become a
more attractive target for hackers and other malicious groups.”

Companies like Nasuni — or rivals like TwinStrata and StorSimple as well as companies like Box, OwnCloud and LogMeIn — pitch their services as enterprise-class secure cloud storage. So, the survey is self-serving for Nasuni, but that doesn’t mean the results aren’t worth noting.

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Nasuni scores $20M to build out storage sales effort

Barb Darrow — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:12:57 +0000

Nasuni, a company that helps distributed offices put their storage in the cloud and manage it securely, has $20 million in new funding to pay for new features and functions and expand sales and marketing.

The Series C round was led by a mystery investor, with other contributions from current backers Flybridge, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Sigma, and brings its total funding to $43 million.

The Natick, Mass.-based Nasuni competes with companies like Panzura, TwinStrata and StorSimple (which was just acquired by Microsoft) in that it lets companies pump their data into public or private clouds and manage it there.

Inside the firewall, Nasuni works with Microsoft Active Directory and supports the popular protocols — CIFS, NFS, iSCSI — that underly NAS and SAN storage. Outside, it can work with any of the major public storage clouds although right now it uses Amazon s3 as its primary storage back-end with Microsoft Azure as backup based on Nasuni’s assessment of their reliability. The data is encrypted from the get go, as well as throughout the process, so that no one — including Nasuni — can pry.

Given the Microsoft-StorSimple deal (the terms of which were not disclosed) the race by the cloud giants to acquire customers — and customer data — is on. That acquisition led to speculation that TwinStrata and Nasuni itself are on the block. Rodriguez denied that that is the case for his company. “We have bigger ambitions than that,” he said.

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Microsoft snags StorSimple to pack more stuff onto Azure

Barb Darrow — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:53:27 +0000

Well, lookie here — a storage company is acquired and EMC is not the buyer. Rather it’s Microsoft that’s snarfing up StorSimple , a cloud storage gateway company founded three years ago by Cisco veteran Ursheet Parihk and Guru Pangal.

The move makes sense. Businesses use StorSimple to pump their data into public cloud storage so it’s a handy on-ramp to Microsoft’s Azure storage system — which some see as a viable contender to Amazon storage. The technology helps companies manage their data both on-premises and in the cloud. Santa Clara, Calif.-based StorSimple — which competes with companies like Nasuni and TwinStrata — already partnered with Microsoft, but it’s partnered with Amazon itself so it will be interesting to see if that continues.

Update: According to Microsoft, there are no plans to change StorSimple’s integration with other cloud providers as a result of this acquisition.

The news comes — coincidentally or not — during the OpenStack Summit — at which companies ranging from Cloudscaling, Dell, Cisco and Dreamhost are unveiling their take on public (and private) clouds based on the open-source OpenStack foundation.

In a statement, Michael Park, corporate VP of Microsoft’s server and tools explained the deal, the terms of which were not disclosed:

“Customers faced with explosive growth in data are looking to the cloud to help them store, manage and archive that data. But, to be effective, cloud storage needs to integrate with IT’s current investments. StorSimple’s approach helps customers seamlessly integrate on-premises storage with cloud storage through intelligent automation and management.”

StorSimple was already a Microsoft partner and Microsoft has made a habit of buying top ISV partners — Great Plains Software, Navision — to build up its software stack or fill in gaps. That track record also makes Microsoft’s relationships with other partners in that same field a tad complicated.

One thing’s for sure: It’s open season as Amazon, Microsoft, the OpenStack crew and Google rush to get customer data on board their respective clouds.

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Nasuni says it gives smartphones first class access to enterprise data

Barb Darrow — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:15:46 +0000

The debate around making enterprise data accessible to employees on their favorite devices has been raging for months. Now, Nasuni, a pioneer of enterprise-class cloud storage, is adding support for Android and Apple mobile devices in a way that it says won’t give IT departments fits.

In short, authenticated users can access their corporate documents from smartphones as securely as they can from their desktops. The key is that IT retains control and can enable/disable these devices individually, remotely wipe them as needed.

The problem of letting users access corporate data from personal devices is the crux of the whole BYOD debate that’s roiled of late. End users want to keep using their favorite devices and tools like Dropbox, but IT chafes at the notion of company data flowing to what they see as vulnerable endpoints.

Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez

“We extend the storage infrastructure so that you can access your files now with your iPhone with the same restrictions, the same security model that applies to your desktop computer,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of the Natick, MA-based company.

Rivals like Dropbox or VMware’s Horizon (aka Octopus) product also integrate with Active Directory but Rodriguez says there is a meaningful difference between integrating with AD and adopting or extending AD to other devices. Those other solutions rely on the creation of an array of peer-to-peer permissions to set access while Nasuni extends existing AD permissions for the user to his or her own other device.

Rodriquez sees Box as complimentary to Nasuni: “Box is good for sharing content outside the organization with contractors, ad or PR agencies etc — people outside your Active Directory. Nasuni uses the same file server you use now — we’re not trying to have you share something outside you’re own walls but we want you to be able to access it from anywhere.”

The new mobile functionality rolls out this week. Nasuni charges customers based on amount of storage under management. Extending internal enterprise security controls to external devices will be a trend. “II’d be shocked if in the next 12 to 24 months all the storage vendors aren’t doing this,” he said.

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Nasuni seeks to unify cloud storage

Barb Darrow — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:27:15 +0000

Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez

The concept of unified storage — in which both file and block storage are managed as one — was pioneered by storage hardware giants like EMC and Hitachi Data Systems. Unified storage technology enables one hardware device to handle both SAN and NAS storage protocols and thus supports both file and block storage.

Now, Nasuni, which manages cloud storage for businesses – mostly mid-sized enterprises as well as departments of bigger enterprises, — is following suit with what it’s calling Unified Storage for ROBO (ROBO stands for remote offices and branch offices.) That means Nasuni, which focused up till now on the file storage prevalent in most branch offices, now supports block storage as well.

“The majority of data in branch offices is in files — structured data but companies also use a lot of block storage. This lets me use one storage box for everything,” Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez told me in a recent interview. Nasuni will deploy this capability via a software upgrade to its controllers in the field and it will be available as of Tuesday.

Businesses can subscribe to Nasuni services either with or without an on-site hardware appliance. Nasuni is also upping the capacity of that appliance with a new NF-400 2U box with 32GB of RAM which supports 900 users and supports up to 6 TB or 12 TB of local cache. Price ranges from $12,500 to $17,500. The existing NF-200 1U box with 16 GB of RAM, supported up to 300 users and 3 TB or 6 TB of local cache. It lists from $4,000 to $6,000.

The need of companies to store data in the cloud is growing as is their need to be assured that this data is secure. For its customers, Nasuni acts like a traditional file system but puts the data in whichever cloud — Amazon, Rackspace, Nirvanix, etc. — is most appropriate at the time and moves it as needed. All the data is encrypted — neither Nasuni nor the cloud provider sees it.

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Public, private or hybrid? How to move to the cloud

Barb Darrow — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:09:40 +0000

As is often discussed at GigaOM Pro, beleaguered IT pros are the ones often left to figure out which applications and data should move first and to which type of cloud. But with more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Let’s take a look.

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