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Nasuni vs. NetApp

A simple choice for file storage.

Why Nasuni?

When your file data needs to be accessible quickly in all your offices, you want it consolidated in a global file system for easy collaboration, management, and AI. You also want to reclaim IT budget for other projects. Nasuni hybrid cloud storage is simply your best choice for all scenarios. Many NetApp customers who switched to the Nasuni File Data Platform wonder why they waited so long to reap the benefits of a solution built specifically for the cloud.

NetApp alphabet soup

Let’s look at how Nasuni compares to the various NetApp products:

NetApp Fabric Attached Storage (FAS). Customers considering legacy NetApp FAS or All Flash FAS (AFF) hardware solutions may not be ready to consolidate on-premises file infrastructure or move data to the public cloud. Consider Nasuni with on-premises object storage (e.g., IBM Cloud Object Storage, NetApp StorageGRID, Pure Storage FlashBlade) as an alternative.

Azure NetApp Files (ANF). This solution is NetApp FAS hosted in an Azure region and offered as a subscription service. Its high cost (even with Cool access tiers for inactive data) plus the costs of snapshots or backup (for data protection) and cross-region replication (for resiliency) make ANF up to 10x more expensive than Nasuni with Azure Blob object storage. This high cost is why ANF is typically used only for high-performance in-cloud storage for SAP and other database applications. Organizations needing SMB or NFS file shares, on-premises caching, or multi-site file collaboration choose Nasuni on Azure Blob.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV). This solution is essentially the Google Cloud version of Azure NetApp Files, with the same high costs and supported use cases. Due to its scalability, simplicity, and lower cost, Nasuni on Google Cloud object storage is the best choice for SMB or NFS file shares, on-premises caching, or multi-site file collaboration.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO). This customer-managed cloud solution is a virtualized instance of NetApp’s ONTAP storage operating system and WAFL file system using public cloud storage and compute resources. While it supports multiple workloads, including enterprise apps, databases, high-performance computing, and file systems, it is more complex than Nasuni for organizations requiring a global namespace and multi-site edge caching. And, it is significantly more expensive.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx ONTAP). This is the AWS version of NetApp CVO, offered by AWS as a fully managed service integrated with AWS services. The combination of Amazon S3 and Nasuni is often the better choice for AWS customers.

The power of being ‘built-for-the-cloud’ from day one

Like NetApp, Nasuni is easily purchased through your favorite reseller or system integrator or from the marketplaces of AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Unlike NetApp, Nasuni was built for the cloud to offer the following benefits:

Effortless scalability

Nasuni’s patented file system scales fully in cloud object storage with no volume, file, user, or location limits. Nasuni makes curating data for AI easy without data silos and easier still with built-in file data analytics. NetApp’s lift-and-shift approach with ONTAP in the cloud carries the scalability limitations of an architecture designed in the 1990s for on-premises hardware.
 

Unlimited recovery points

Nasuni Continuous File Versioning technology provides built-in backup with unlimited version retention in object storage. Recovery points can be as often as every few minutes, and millions of files and petabytes of file data can be restored to any location in minutes. Due to its legacy architecture, NetApp has snapshot (recovery point) limitations.
 

Edge caching

Nasuni Edges cache copies of “hot” data from your preferred cloud object storage on lightweight virtual machines that can be provisioned in any on-premises or cloud region in minutes. By bringing file data close to users and applications, Nasuni edges provide high-performance SMB (CIFS), NFS, S3, and HTTPS access without cloud latency, while minimizing egress fees. NetApp BlueXP Edge Cache (formerly Global File Cache), NetApp’s first attempt to provide similar capabilities, is no longer available. The only option for on-premises caching is now NetApp FlexCache, which requires full NetApp FAS systems and runs counter to the goal of consolidating on-premises infrastructure.

Global namespace

Nasuni can present the same file shares and files in any number of on-premises locations or cloud regions to support multi-site collaboration workflows. Our patented cloud orchestration service provides global file locking to minimize version conflict and prioritized data propagation to accelerate file synchronization. NetApp does not offer equivalent cloud-scale capabilities.
 

Cost optimization

Nasuni, along with your preferred cloud object storage, offers up to 75% lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), even when considering NetApp FabricPool tiering which divides file data between ONTAP performance and capacity tiers. Request a head-to-head TCO comparison to see how much you could save with Nasuni.

Dow’s journey from legacy file storage to Nasuni

Dow needed file data to be accessible worldwide with limited latency. Learn how Dow evaluated competitors and ultimately chose Nasuni to optimize their environment.

 

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