Name: March Demo & Dash
Uploaded: 2025-03-18T15:46:03.491Z
Duration: 30 min 20 s
Description: March Demo & Dash

Transcript for "March Demo & Dash": Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we're glad you could make it for this episode of our demo and dash series. I know many of you have heard of Nasuni, and you've been you're here to see more about about the product. Before we get started, I do want to encourage you to ask any questions that come to mind. Hopefully, one of these questions that are actually related to Nasuni, that'll be good. But, any of those questions and then, you can put them in the q and a tab, and, and we will get to them either during the course of this session, or we will answer them after, or we will follow-up if you you if that is necessary. And, one of the people that, joins us or ask a question in that in the q and a will be, elected and picked to to win a hundred dollar DoorDash gift card. So, a little a little bribery never hurt anybody. That's the spirit. And so we want we want to, certainly encourage all the questions and and answer, really, at the end of the day, answer your questions about Nasuni, because that's why that's why you're here. That's why you're just taking time out of your day. So let's get started and talk a little bit around hybrid cloud storage. Many of you are here because you're faced with a similar challenge, before we kinda dive into the to the demo portion of this. It's just a level set for everybody that's here. You know, traditional file infrastructures that many of us face whether even whether it be deployed in the data center or even sometimes in the cloud, involves so many components. Everything from, you know, backup and recovery software to separate ransomware protection to and then you've got Doctor sites set up, you've got remote offices and branch office locations that you've gotta deal with, and you've got data really scattered everywhere. And this introduces a lot of silos of data, and it also introduces a lot of administrative headache, which some of you are, almost certainly feeling, which is why you're here and why you're learning about, a unified platform like Nasuni. Where but the concept of hybrid cloud storage and and the idea is that all of your all of your, all of your data is in a single location. Your files are all accessed within a global namespace, that is that is stored in object storage in the cloud, and backup and restoration of those files, is inherent within the architecture as is disaster recovery. Ransomware protection can be built in. Access and collaboration with file synchronization on a global level is is also built in. We'll talk about that. But everything's incorporated within a within a single platform. And this has serious ramifications from a cost perspective, certainly. The cost savings that go with that that our customers realize when they move from this traditional nightmare of a a legacy file infrastructures into a single, global unified file system are significant. And it's not just the cost, it's the speed of recovery. If some if I should say when something happens. Right? And the the accelerated global collaboration that can happen, which really impacts the business. And so this is interesting. Pardon me while I navigate this. That's interesting. So, and why do you do this? There are some sort of, like, three main reasons why an organization like yours and like so many others has gone to a unified file data platform really kind of falls in three buckets. One is IT efficiency. And if many of you, I think, are going to be in the in the IT department, in I in an either administrative or leadership role. And anything you can do to streamline operations, really target and tailor the resource utilization within the department, is going to, really have a a major impact on all the things that you're that you can do as an IT department. And and, of course, the associated with that is the cost. When you when you dramatically simplify your infrastructure, you can realize cost savings very quickly. Most of our customers see an ROI in months, not years. They get that return on investment very quickly, and it actually accelerates the more the larger the environment, is and the more the more data you have under management. And the other component of this is business resilience. You can't do anything these days without talking about security. And the beautiful thing about a unified file data platform like Nasuni is that you can recover very quickly, exponentially faster than your traditional backup and recovery software that you might be familiar with. As most of our customers, if not all, but really, will when they move to Nasuni, they eliminate their file data backup and recovery infrastructure and software licenses. So guess what? That might have a little bit of a cost savings as well. So and the speed of recovery is is in is in minutes, not hours or days, which is, kind of important. So I mentioned global collaboration. What we're gonna see here in the demo, illustrate as we go through how you manage the the Nasuni console and then and the Sunni environment, is that you're dealing with you're managing filers and or and and edge appliances that are that are deployed out locally where your users are. And this really facilitates, very fast local access. You don't have the cloud latency that you might ex you might associate with, oh, I'm having everything stored in the cloud. That's gonna that's gonna really slow me down. Not at all. And Nasuni is architected to be able to intelligently cache that information, have it available locally, and it handles large files very well. In fact, we have a, hundreds of customers that are in the architecture, engineering, and construction space, and manufacturing where they're dealing with very large files, three d models, CAD drawings, you name it. Weights files way larger than your average PowerPoint, and, and you're able to have teams work on that simultaneously around the globe very smoothly and seamlessly, not waiting for files to be, you know, transferred and downloaded and FTP'd to each other or who knows what else. So, the other thing I'll mention real quickly is before we dive into the demo is the fact that all of you, I am certain, are thinking about AI and have to deal with it or you've got your bosses asking about AI or what are we doing for AI and how are we gonna manage our data? How are we gonna make sure that we're leveraging the right corporate intellectual property and delivering that through my AI services that I wanna bring to market either to my users internally or to my customers? Having us all your data in a single global main space. When you do your research on on AI and get being AI ready or having your your data surface, you're gonna find that silos of information are bad. Having all of your unstructured file data in a single location, that one source of truth, no discrepancies between versions of files, is this the right one? You're looking at last year's model. None of that. It goes away. And the edge caches enable you to, you know, bring the data out to the edge and have AI work on fresh data and pump that back into the center in the system. And that resilience that we talked about in terms of, rapid mean time to recovery is even more important when you're thinking about servicing data and surfacing data. I'm sorry. Up to, out through various, AI inter integrations, through RAG, what have you. You wanna make sure that that's always available and and is not, generating wrong results when suddenly the serve the services are not there. That's a bit of an intro. So kinda going into why Nasuni is so is popular, why it sees such rapid adoption. And, but we really want today we wanna show you how it works and how it's managed. So for today, my good friend Jeremy Miller couldn't be here today, but he did record a demo, and we're gonna walk through that very quickly and or the next few minutes. And so watch the video, ask your questions during the course of this, and we will address them either during the video, the playback, or right afterwards. Alright? So with that, I will Great. Well, thanks for taking the time again, to spend some time with us here today. Again, my name is Jeremy Miller, solutions architect here at Nasuni. So what I'll be taking you through is kind of a an overview demo, of the Nasuni file data platform, from the administrative standpoint, what that looks like to an end user. And we'll also include, some of our capabilities around multisite collaboration with our file locking, as well as wrap things up, with a a ransomware protection demo, from our capabilities there. So what you're looking at, currently is the Nasuni management console. This is the, single, stop, for managing all things related to Nasuni, to your volumes, to your, cloud credentials, as well as your cyber resiliency with that ransomware protection. And what you're seeing when when we first log in, is, some system health information, making sure that everything is up to date, everything is online and and working as we would expect. And we can also, you know, see that our subscription's valid, the number of volumes that we're managing, the number of edge appliances, which show up here as filers in the interface, and the amount of data that's accessible, via our shares. We also see a a quick snapshot, of things like data growth, traffic, the types of data, that we have within the system, as well as, some of the sizing, of that data. So we can we can get an idea, of what the environment looks like. On top of that, Nasuni also, has, recently rolled out what we call Nasuni IQ, which is, an additional set of dashboards to really give you, additional usage or or additional information, around things like file usage, tracking, reporting, understanding, you know, end user behavior, where files have been moved to. So really visibility into everything happening within the file system, also information around system health, performance. And I think what we're seeing for a lot of customers is looking at also more proactive, planning, whether that, be, you know, curating things for for an AI strategy, or just making sure, you know, that they're optimizing the system. So, again, that that's accessible via, via Nasuni IQ. So when we when we take a look at, you know, Nasuni and what we provide, again, leveraging, an object storage file system in the back end, and then presenting that, via an edge appliance, to get that local access and and local speed and performance. For end users, the first question, I usually get is, you know, what does this look like for my end user? So we'll we'll step away from the management console here for just a moment. And, really, the the the real benefit, from a from an end user perspective is that, while on the administrative side for for the IT team, they're gaining all the benefits, of, you know, more a more scalable platform, more durability with the built in data protection. From a from an end user standpoint, I'm I'm still, presented with the same, shares and and map drives that I've always been working on. None of my workflows need to change, and I continue to access my data, the same way I always have, albeit, you know, the majority of that data no longer sitting potentially in my data center, but just, you know, the most recently accessed files, giving me that performance at the edge. So we'll we'll jump in and take a look. I think, go into this projects folder. Again, one of the things we can do, is the entire file system can be presented to the users. Only a portion of these files actually exist in cache cache, so you're you're gaining some space savings in the data center, reduce the amount of disk consumption, by your file system, but still be able to provide, all of that to the users. At any point, you know, all the files are accessible. We'll open up a file here. And, again, I can interact with this the way I always have. We'll actually start to make some changes. We'll maybe just update the date here today. Actually, we'll just remove the date, and, we'll just type updated. So I'm gonna save that change. The, the other thing that we're able to provide is, I mentioned file locking. So part of our multisite collaboration capability is providing file locking where we've got multiple edge appliances, potentially, in the same office, but maybe, you know, remote offices across the country, even around the globe, where we want to be able to present that data, to users in each site, but we wanna, you know, avoid any sort of version conflicts, with having multiple rights from multiple sites. So what that allows us to do is is enable that, file locking. And if I go to open this document, from another, Edge Appliance, I'm gonna be presented that lock notification. So it's letting me know the file is currently locked. I'm gonna be presented options depending on the application, in this case, Microsoft Word, on how I want to handle that. In this case, I'll say, I just wanna receive a notification when the original copy becomes available. That's gonna open that up for me then, in a read only copy. And then as that initial, user finishes up, saves their changes, and closes that file, we begin pushing that data, from that edge appliance into the object store. So we're writing any changes that have happened. We're also communicating with that lock server, to go ahead and release that lock. And then once that's done, that will actually sync with the the secondary edge appliance, letting them know here's the the appropriate changes. We can see it's now going to allow me to open that read write copy, and we'll see that those changes, that updated, is giving me the latest and greatest copy. Again, the other real benefit to that is that the file locking capabilities is not something you as a customer need to deploy. That is a, the file lock servers are are managed by Nasuni as a SaaS service. Just a matter of, including that in your licensing and and enabling that, on a particular directory, to unlock that that capability. So switching gears just a bit, again, from an end user perspective, you know, we often see end users that, you know, may, incidentally delete files and intentionally delete files, you know, really depending on on the situation. But at some point, you know, you may need to be able to provide, file level recovery. We'll actually jump in and, and delete, a section of files here. And, you know, one one option we have for from a recovery perspective is to use the the previous version's workflow, you may be avail familiar with, as part of the the typical Windows file server type workflow, giving users, access to a limited scope, of those recovery points. But more more most common would be that, you know, you as an administrator, are then tasked with being able to, to help them recover those files. And so for that, we'll jump back to the the management console. We'll come into the the volumes tab. And from here, we have what we call our file browser. So this is what allows us to to view the the current and and previous, versions of the file system. In this case, we'll, we'll jump to that particular volume where that data resided, in that home directory or myself, in my project files. And we'll see, as as expected, the the directory is currently empty. All those files have been deleted. But, again, at the edge, Nasuni is frequently about every five to fifteen minutes taking snapshots and versioning that file system. So I can then come back into this browser and and view all of those points, today that we've taken that snapshot, and and all of those are now recovery points for me. I can simply select one of those versions, view what the file system looked like at that point in time, going back in this case, about 30 viewing all of my, my files, I'm gonna simply tell it to go ahead and restore. Don't need to back up the existing files in this case. I'm just gonna tell it to go ahead and restore that folder. We see that's already finished. If I jump back, those files are populating, and the users are back up and running. So it really allows us to to restore incredibly quickly, because, our file system, is using those immutable objects, to be able to provide that recovery. We're just updating metadata, allows us to recover, incredibly quickly, because we're not having to move, from one media set to another to provide that that recovery. Moving on, the the filers, this is where all the edge appliances are managed. Spoke with a a a customer the other day that moved from managing 96 Windows file servers, to down to just managing a few Nasuni Edge appliances, both from a scale perspective. They no longer had the scale limitations, but also from just a consolidation and management. Just giving you one location to be able to manage all of those appliances, across your sites, be able to, you know, view the, the status of those, the the uptime, the health, make sure everything's, operating as we would expect, for that particular appliance, but also giving you one place to manage patching and updates to these appliances so that, as we release new feature functionality and updates to the underlying code, we're giving you a a very simple platform to be able to come in here, and manage those edge appliances. The the next tab is the account tab. This gives you information about your Nasuni licensing, allows you to make make sure that you're you're staying up to date, you know what, what you're licensed for. This is important because Nasuni is not like traditional storage where we need to make estimates and do capacity planning, and try to understand, you know, how much storage are we gonna need in the next three to five years. Instead, Nasuni, you know, we want you to to leverage, you know, 90 to 95% of your license, make sure you're getting the greatest value, out of out of your license. So this just gives you an easy way to be able to see that capacity, see the number of of edge appliances that are being managed. And from here, we can also, access things like your cloud credentials and your serial numbers, which allows you to deploy, the appliances without the need for, you know, intervention or assistance from, Nasuni support, enables you to be able to deploy all that on your own, very, very easily. Jumping into console settings, a few things of note here. One is that console settings would be used to, set up any sort of alerting. So if you are, looking to consolidate, you know, logging and alerting from the system, we've got an a number of ways to do that. Another thing of note is, role based access control. So within users and groups here, giving you the ability to manage, in this case, I've got in my lab a help desk group set up. Within that, you can see the the granular permissions that we can provide to that particular group. In this case, I have that set up for providing, file restores, disconnecting users that that may have left an open session, and then making sure they can provide those restores to to any location. So, you know, preventing those users from needing full access and full administrative capabilities within the management console, while also making sure, you know, they can, perform those to those operations, and take that load off potentially another team. And then that can all be tied back, as well to, you know, domain groups. All of our edge appliances get, active directory domain joined, use traditional NTFS permissions, and that and that holds true here within the management console as well. So moving on to the cyber resilience. Again, I mentioned our our ransomware protection, and this really goes above and beyond the the data protection that we're providing with the file versioning that that mentioned earlier. This is giving a much more proactive look at the file system, that allows us to provide, both detection, and mitigation. This happens in real time. This is a a service that runs on the edge appliance. I I've spoke with many customers that are, you know, using backup products or other kind of post process, tool sets to try to identify ransomware in their environment. This gives you a much again, a much more proactive, front end, look and and protection for the file system. So, enabling ransomware protection is as simple as, toggling on the detection and or mitigation, on a particular volume. And, we'll actually jump over, and we'll simulate, a ransomware attack. So, I have a directory here, with with a number of photos in it. And, I have a ransomware script, so we're gonna go ahead and execute that against that particular directory. One thing to keep in mind, Nasuni's ransomware protection, is looking for both, known patterns and extensions. We subscribe to, you know, public lists, for those extensions to really understand quickly when we recognize an attack. But we're also using behavior based. So looking for destructive actions, looking for changes to the file system, the way end users are interacting with the files so that we can catch even those, kind of unknown patterns and extensions, that may crop up and be more zero day type attacks. We'll see. I didn't get too far here. It began encrypting my files. My PowerShell script just, failed out on me, and I'm left with, a number of files here, that have been encrypted. If we jump back, we're gonna notice, some alerts starting to come in. So it's letting me know it's detected that ransomware attack, and and based on the known signature. Again, we could send out alerts, a number of different ways, email, syslog, SNMP traps to make sure that you're getting notified and and know that something's going on with the file system. But we give you a one stop shop to be able to come, get gather some additional information, about what was taking place. So we'll see here in the incident management screen, that it's giving me a a time stamp, for this particular incident, the volume that's been impacted, the appliance that, that was seeing this attack, our current confidence level. So this can be, modified, depending on on your environment to make sure that we fine tune, these this, capability to make sure we're not creating false positives, but making sure also that that you're notified quickly, when something is taking place. And in this case, using a known signature, it did key in on that dot deadbolt extension. Also, what allowed us to reach that confidence level quicker, and, you know, take action with that mitigation policy stopping, that script from having any further access to the shares. Within the incident management, we're also then able to provide, visibility into an incident report. So this is, again, gonna give me a a a summary of the attack, the number of files that were impacted, the user that was involved in that attack. If we scroll down a bit, an event time line. So, identifying kind of end to end this particular incident, understanding the last good version or snapshot, for the files that have been impacted, when we first saw, violations taking place, when we generated the incident and began notifying. And, ultimately, in this case, the mitigation did take effect, and blocked the client, that was accessing the file system. We can see additional details on the timeline, the current status of that client, being blocked out, and then the first one hundred impacted files. We're also logging all this information to, separate logs, that would, potentially include beyond 100 files, if it took a little bit longer to, to reach that confidence level. But we definitely have this, this logged end to end again so that, the most important step, is the ability to then recover, from one of these incidents. And so that's part of the incident management as well. If I click the targeted restore, here within the management console, again, letting me know, I had 30 affected files. The the restore point started the attack. In this case, I'm gonna delete the ransomware files. They're encrypted, and that that version is, is not useful at this point. I don't need to back them up. I could send them off to a different destination if I wanted to keep those around for any sort of forensics, with the security team. But in this case, I'm just gonna tell it to go ahead and restore the files. It's gonna ask me to confirm that we want to roll back from this incident. Click restore files. While that's happening, you can see the, the restore is in progress. I'm gonna pull up that directory. And before I got there, the restore is completed, and all my files, have been restored. So, really allowing, our customers to to restore much more quickly, to minimize the the amount of impacted files, when a ransomware event does take place, and and using this console again to to restore without having to, dig through logs and really understand which was impacted, when was the last good restore point, because we've tracked this end to end. We really cover that all for you. And then we also, if we jump back into that instant report one final time, update that, to include the restore, giving you that timeline, so that you have a full snapshot of, of end to end of that attack, from the time it began to the time you're able to get that restored, and get users back up and operational. So that's, the overview for today, on the Nasuni, file that data platform. We also touched on the file, locking capabilities, and finally here, the ransomware protection. Certainly hope that was helpful for you. Alright, folks. Thank you very much, for for watching, and, hopefully, I gave you a kind of a quick overview of what the what management experience is like and some of the capabilities, that that are available within Nasuni. You know, we've only got a a few minutes left. We've had some great questions come in. One in particular, let me see if I can. From David David Fox. If we're fully cloud and SaaS with no servers or storage infrastructure, is there an option to fully host in the cloud with no local appliances? The answer is absolutely yes. Number of our customers do that. We've had some customers that have shut down entire data centers, and, and moved entirely to the cloud. So if you've got a cloud first initiative or partial cloud initiative, whatever the case may be, yes. You can absolutely do this all in the cloud. Your appliances can virtually in the cloud, and, of course, the object store and and the access points. So, thank you for that great question, David. You know, as we wrap up today, you know, probably the next step, you you we came you're looking at Nasuni. You're investigating your options. Congratulations on the fact that you're you're you're looking into modernizing and transforming your environment. That's fantastic. Look. We know that we can definitely help you as we've helped hundreds of other customers. We just encourage you to, take the next step and schedule a personalized demo of your own because your your environment's going to be unique. It's gonna you're gonna have your own questions, your own issues, your own your own, processes and workflows and use cases to address. And we'd love to help you understand how Nasuni can transform your IT environment, your infrastructure, and save you a lot of money in the process and really set you up for success long term, especially when it comes to our good friend AI. So gotta mention AI. Right? So, anyway, thank you so much for coming and taking some time out of your day, and we look forward to seeing you at our next event whenever that may be. Alright? Have a great day, everyone, and thank you for coming.