Nasuni’s UniFS uses stream of snapshots to create a versioned file system inside the enterprise and within the cloud.
Nasuni, a provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service, has received US patent 8,566,362 at the core file system utilized in its Nasuni Filer products. The file system is UniFS, and in contrast to most object store file systems, it generates a stream of snapshots that could take where of backup systems, in keeping with CEO Andres Rodriguez. “It is a file system born for the cloud,” he said in an interview at Amazon’s Re:Invent event in Las Vegas last week.
When storage moved into the cloud, it established a fundamentally different way of generating large-scale storage. Systems like Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Storage, Amazon Web Services S3, and Google’s Cloud Datastore are object storage systems that capture and hold data within the style of files. The files may vary widely in size and contain forms of data, or they just be a “blob” of audio, video, or other multimedia data. And within the cloud, such object store systems may scale out indefinitely, unlike enterprise storage systems, that are typically limited to the dimensions of the hardware and difficult drives on which they’re located. The dimensions-out architecture of the cloud allows it to feature servers and disks as needed.
Nasuni has get a hold of the way to create a versioned file storage system during which a snapshot captures a version of the total system at a given cut-off date. The snapshot could be referenced to rebuild lost files if sooner or later data is destroyed or lost.
[ Wish to learn more concerning the competitiveness of cloud storage systems? See Google Cuts Prices On New Datastore Service.]
It’s possible to simplify backup systems within the cloud because when data is stored within the cloud, the company routinely makes two additional copies. If the cloud server or disk fails, there’ll still be two remaining copies, from which a 3rd is made immediately following a knowledge loss. Nasuni’s UniFS takes benefit of that property. In place of creating its own constant replications, it is determined by the cloud systems to copy the date while keeping a stream of snapshots.
“We’ve decoupled the storage controller from the entire data tied to a storage array,” noted Rodriguez. The Nasuni storage controller is free to tap into storage resources in a distributed fashion, matching up storage resources within the enterprise with related storage services in either the Microsoft or Amazon cloud.
Rodriguez is without doubt one of the inventors listed at the patent. Any other is Robert S. Mason, president and co-founding father of Nasuni and a former software engineer at Hitachi Data Systems, Archivas, and EMC.
A brief summary of the patent refers back to the interface between an enterprise file system and a Nasuni managed service within the cloud: An interface between an existing local file system and an information store (e.g., a “write-once” store) provides a “versioned” file system. The state of the local file system at a given time limit would be determined using the versioned file system.
Rodriguez said Nasuni is attempting to bridge the distance between a conventional file system, often found on enterprise premises, and the stableness and scale of cloud systems. Inside the cloud, storage can scale up past even very large enterprise systems corresponding to the previous Sun Microsystems’ ZFS.
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