Name: January Demo & Dash
Uploaded: 2025-01-21T16:57:03.805Z
Duration: 29 min 20 s
Description: January Demo & Dash

Transcript for "January Demo & Dash": Hey, everybody. How are you doing today? Thank you for taking the time to join us at this short but informative little demonstration slash webinar. We're going to, spend most of our time with my friend to my I guess that'd be my left, Jeremy Miller, solutions architect and, and legendary professor of all things Nasuni. He'll be joining and giving us a little demo here. But I am, as we get a few folks joining, I'm going to go ahead and give you what you all really wanna see, which is it that's right. PowerPoint slides. And, before we get started, I do wanna point out that you will notice over on the right side of your screen, there's a chat, messages, docs, and QA, well, we'll call them tabs. You can post any messages you want there. You can put q and a, though, really, is probably where you wanna go. If you have anything that comes up, you wanna ask some questions, please put them in the q and a tab, and we'll get to as many as we can. And there's some documentation there, a couple documents there that are are relevant to our conversation today. Feel free to download those and take a look at your leisure. So, see, we got a few folks piling in. Let's go ahead and get started and get to the demo. Alright. So, listen. A couple of things just to set the stage here. For many of you, I'd like to probably say most people most organizations are looking at a file storage infrastructure model that is insanely complex and it and prohibitively expensive. That is you know, that has servers in different locations. You're dealing with remote offices. You've gotta support remote workers, of course. You've got a number of different applications, and you have a wide variety of file types. And you have to worry about backup and recovery of all this, which is its own infrastructure, which, you know, clearly, you know, carries its own costs and, and with not only the hardware, but the software licenses associated with that. And so and and when you're you're why do you do this? You know, just because you're a glutton for punishment? Probably not. You you're doing this because you've got lots of data to provide and support your users in their various locations. But in these in this type of model, in this sort of typical file storage infrastructure, you end up creating silos. And the silos, they become isolated from one another, and there may be bridges between them, but usually that means copying files. Right? Or people resorting to bizarre behavior like, well, I can't find the file. Can you just mail it to me and I'll work on it? Now I've got 2 versions or 3 versions of the file floating around, and the project is now, you're you're dealing with multiple versions of the truth, which downstream will cause you problems. Right? So and and to say nothing of the fact that all these silos are hard to scale. They don't and it's hard to have consistent protection and data and data policies and and RBAC, you know, so policies and permissions associated with this data. And so, all of this starts to be eventually a problem, and it certainly doesn't set you up for any kind of AI data readiness because you don't know where your data is. So that all of this is just kind of a mess. And what you're looking at here today and what you're what you've joined us here to to check out is a demonstration of the of an a unified approach to a file data platform. So what you're gonna see is an administrative, you know, console, how we manage an entire environment in one place to drive down your costs, to improve the resilience of your business, to say nothing of IT, because you can actually eliminate entirely the need for file backup and recovery software and the hardware with it, and make your team more efficient. Do more with less. None of us have budgets that just keep on increasing exponentially to handle file data growth in our environments. So we had to get smart about it. We had to kinda have to future proof our business so that we can grow as the business grows and not be stuck. Well, I gotta buy another array or, hey. Let's stand up another server in Topeka because, you know, they need access to this specific data. It's like, no. We can put a stop to that. So with that as a just a very brief intro as to why you care about unifying your file data platform and bringing everything together under one umbrella, I'm going to pass it over to Jeremy. And, I'm gonna ask Jeremy to go ahead and give us, a stellar and informative and succinct and eloquent demonstration. No pressure, Jeremy. On on on all this. Alright. Let's take it away. 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 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 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, 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 ax 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 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, you know, 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 5 to 15 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 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 minutes, viewing all of my, my files, I'm 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 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 3 to 5 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 a 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 spoken many customers that are, you know, using backup products or other kind of post process, toolsets to try to identify ransomware in their environment. This gives you a much again, a much more proactive, front end look 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. I 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 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 timeline. 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 100 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 incident 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, FileVet Data platform. We also touched on the file, locking capabilities, and finally here, the ransomware protection. Certainly hope that was helpful for you. Alright. Hey. I've learned how to use this. Okay. So, listen. Thanks everybody for joining, and for for for that that demonstration. I mean, you know, the, the ransomware protection is a is a hot topic. I just had a question about that here in the, in the session. And, you know, that that incident report that Jeremy just showed is pretty critical for being able to report back up the food chain to the the c level executives. They're gonna come knocking on your door asking what happened to to to say nothing of the fact that, you know, if you have to file an insurance claim, you need all the details. Right? So, all this is critical. And, you know, I think one thing that make sure is clear here is that this is all happening at the edge. So these edge appliances, which are, you know, most commonly just virtual machines, as soon as that behavior, as soon as we start to detect that a bunch of files are being corrupted and there's either either because of a known signature or just because of anomalous behaviors, unusual behavior, we we there's a threshold that kicks in as Jeremy showed, and we and automatically stop all activity at the edge. So it's kind of an early warning system, if you will. And it can tie in to your SecOps department and the and the tools they're using. If they're using something like, you know, Microsoft Sentinel or CrowdStrike or what have you, you can, you can have that kick in and all that information be shared with them. So we've had a couple of questions also show up in different maybe oh, 2 locations. Okay. Ned asks, is the Nasuni file data platform designed with built in high availability and resilience features which utilize a distributed file system and automatic failover capabilities to minimize downtime during hardware fail failures. The answer Jeremy, I'll let you extrapolate on that, but the answer is yes. Because, the architecture, the the the hub and spoke architecture, if you will, using object storage in the in the cloud as the multi copy of your data. If one of those edge devices goes down, it's a very simple matter to do disaster recovery and and bring that bring a new machine or a local virtual machine, whether it's even in the cloud, bring that back up and and let those users get back up and running. And but even to your, you know, your question about failover, you simply point to a new location. So, I think that answers. Anything you wanna add there, Jeremy, to Ned's question? No. Yeah. I think you covered it, Lance. Yeah. I would say there's a lot of things we can do because of that global name space and and because everything centralized in the cloud, it really just becomes an access question. So there's a lot of technology we can take advantage of to to provide exactly what you're asking about there, Ned. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's a common question, Ned, but, but a great one, because, it's it's hard to say you have resiliency when something goes down and no one can get their data. It doesn't say it doesn't seem like it. Right? In a related question from, somebody, how many edge devices can I have in a single Nasuni environment? Oh, man. Lots. More more more than enough. I guess it was the answer. We have some very large customer deployments with, with hundreds of edge appliances or devices you wanna call them. Do you know if there's an upper limit on that, Jeremy? There probably is a is a limit somewhere, but not a not a functional one that, that we've ever had to worry about. Yeah. Yeah. It would be more of a practical limit than anything. I mean, yeah. I guess if you have every if every person on earth is an employee and they all need access, then how many devices yeah. We could do that math, but it hasn't come up yet. I I think that's the, more than you need. It can support more than you'll ever need. How about that? I know it's kind of a vague answer, but I'll I'll say that. I answered a question about how does the SunuGuard against a cybersecurity attack. Ashanti asked that question sort of a little bit before what you actually just in time with what you demonstrated. So I think, I think we're pretty good there, but, because you you you happen to be demonstrating it, which is very timely. So, I think that's it. I guess I would ask I would ask, everybody to, you know, I would first of all, thank you for joining. You know, the idea of this was to just show the product in action, kinda give an idea from an administrative perspective. What does it look like to to manage all this in a single environment? As I mentioned earlier on, have having everything in a single place is is pretty awesome. Right? Right? And, is is, is huge benefits from a from a cost savings perspective, from a resilience perspective. You're adding in that additional layer of cybersecurity to your environment and just making your IT more efficient. Right? You don't have to run all these different solutions, different platforms, Windows file servers here, NetApp and Isilon over there. It just becomes a real headache. You can you can use resources more effectively and say nothing of making your business more effective because you're not duplicating data and creating silos that just create confusion. So, I we encourage you, even though we showed you a little bit of a demo, everybody's a little bit different. So scan this QR code with your phone, which I know you all have in your hands, including me. And, and if you want to schedule a time to actually have a personalized demonstration, we can get on the phone with you and kinda walk through your specific needs and answer your specific question as part of your learning and part of your evaluation, and as a how you consider to modernize and improve your environment. And, really, at the end of the day, you know, if you're an IT, you're you're here to make the business successful, and we're here to make you successful in doing so. So we encourage you to do so. We we thank you for your time and attendance, taking a half hour out of your day. And with that, we will say farewell, and we hope to talk to you soon. Thank you so much.