Navigating Nasuni

I love startups. Someone has to come up with a hopefully great idea and have the gut to see it through. A few weeks ago I gave a quick glimpse of Nasuni. So did Bruce Hoard, editor-in-chief of Virtualization Review, which you can read here.The CEO, Andres Rodriguez, is seemingly connected to everyone that matters in the virtualization and cloud space.

Andres realizes storage is an expense, complex and hard to manage. And to do it right, you need multiple layers of backup, like with what EMC calls Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

Each tier needs to be built and maintained. Big shops start with a SAN and then add tiers to backup the SAN -- which may include an entirely new SAN.

Nasuni wants to take over some of these tiers with its cloud storage platform -- they'll do this dirty work for you, freeing you to spend time on more forward-thinking strategic projects.

While still a young concern, Nasuni is on the second rev of its Nasuni Filer. It first takes a while to get your arms around the concept but then it all comes clear. Basically, the filer is a NAS that, instead of storing your gigabytes and terabytes on on-premise arrays, intelligently shuffles the data off to the cloud where the storage is virtually endless.

The Filer is hypervisor-friendly, and can handle the storage for your VMware or Hyper-V VMs. It can also move that Hyper-V data over to Azure.

Companies like Nasuni are the true heroes -- startups have created nearly every new technology category, from browsers to virtualization to the cloud.

What is your favorite startup of all time? Cast your vote at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 11/30/2010 at 12:47 PM