Jesse was launching this at PyCon last week. It's a simple appliance NAS server that your normal, every day end users save files to via CIFS or NFS. It just happens to back onto the cloud.
I.e: a secretary saves files to their D: drive, and it's in the cloud. And when you run out of disk space, you buy more from your cloud provider and suddenly there's another 10TB on your D: drive.
I find this very neat as it brings cloud benefits (around reliability and expansion) to real people, using crappy early 2000s desktop apps - ie, most people using computers.
Why I'm feeling really complimented right now - I'm just a Nasuni employee. Last week at PyCon I did a lightning talk thanking the Python world for everything that helped us along.
But; back to the product - you're spot on. It's a auto-scaling NAS device, with snapshots/versioning, end to end encryption, etc. There's actually no need to "buy more" from the cloud vendor - we do that automatically/seamlessly.
Cloud storage is nice because there is no real "transaction" to buy new storage - you just consume what you need. So your office, secretaries, and CEOs can just write to the shared drive endlessly. The never ending hard drive, so to speak.
> real people, using crappy early 2000s desktop apps
I wish more companies would concentrate on these kinds of uses rather than whatever the next social media thing is supposed to be. It basically describes my sys admin life and is something I will cheerfully spend money on.
Some desktops apps should not be in the cloud. Letting the cloud generate your passwords is a bad idea. Complexity kills and the cloud ain't simple. Who has outsourced what to where?
Agreed. But in this case, neither the file server provider nor the backend storage provider can see your data - speaking to Jesse quickly at PyCon this seems to have been a very deliberate design decision.
I.e: a secretary saves files to their D: drive, and it's in the cloud. And when you run out of disk space, you buy more from your cloud provider and suddenly there's another 10TB on your D: drive.
I find this very neat as it brings cloud benefits (around reliability and expansion) to real people, using crappy early 2000s desktop apps - ie, most people using computers.
Jesse's blog port on the launch: http://jessenoller.com/2010/02/09/say-hello-nasuni-launches-...