One of the great advantages of cloud computing is its scalability. As your company’s needs grow or shrink you can adjust your requirements accordingly – providing you have sourced your cloud service providers sensibly and have not been tied in to a one size fits all contract which could mean you end up paying for a service you do not fully need. One of the cloud service areas that is expanding is storage, and Amazon is probably the best known. But if you are unfamiliar with this sector you may think “How the hell do I get all my data stored on these services?”
Basically there are two steps. First you need to sign up for the likes of the Amazon S3 service and then find an intermediary that acts as a conduit through which your files pass and managed, This can be done through NAS (Network Attached Storage) and company that offers this service is Nasuni which offers a turnkey solution for companies of all sizes.
Similar to Cloudberry which has been reviewed here, Nasuni offers storage with Amazon but also Iron Mountain and Nirvanix is coming on board soon.
The conduit is provided through the Nasuni filer software which sits on your network and backs up data using Synchronous Snap shots which:
- Capture your whole system at regular intervals.
- Find, view and restore all past versions of your files quickly.
- Restore a single file, a directory or an entire file system.
- Bulk restores become operable just minutes after theyʼre initiated.
- Easy and fast disaster recovery.
- Set your snapshot frequency.
- Throttle the bandwidth of your snapshots.
Nasuni uses a fast cache system that enables users to quickly access data that is stored on the cloud server – for most businesses, the cache will hold about a yearʼs worth of fast-access active files even if you chose the option to store data on multiple cloud options.
Costs are split in two – one for the Nasuni server family and the other for the storage. Nasuni’s costs are $300 a month for unlimited users – with a 12 and 24 month pre-pay option. Amazon’s costs are $0.15 per GB, Iron Mountain’s are $0.65/GB and when Nirvanix comes on board they will be charging $0.25/GB.
