Nasuni, a provider of enterprise storage based in Natick, Mass., has received a U.S. patent that covers the company's core technology: the ability to create a versioned file system from the object-based storage infrastructure of public cloud storage providers.
The new approach combines the performance and consistency of a traditional file system with the scale and stability of the object storage systems used by all of the leading public cloud providers. IT benefits by being able to rely on what is essentially an infinite snapshot stream that eliminates the need for separate backup and archiving systems, according to the company.
When deployed at scale, object storage systems are cost-effective, stable and highly available, but they are also relatively slow and offer no consistency model for changes to data. The vast majority of enterprise data is stored in file systems where performance and consistency are paramount, so raw cloud storage isn't a good fit for primary storage.
Nasuni's core technology, UniFS, bridges the gap by leveraging local snapshots to create a direct mapping between a high-performance file system and a series of immutable (WORM) versions of the file system that are then committed to the object store. This technology ensures Nasuni's file system can grow forever without the capacity limits of physical set by traditional hardware-based file systems.
To read the full text of U.S. Patent No. 8,566,362, please follow the link.
For more information, visit Nasuni.