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Considerate CTERA comes running to tell us of a Nasuni outage

Nasuni CEO: First outage in 3 years of this system being live

A CTERA spokesperson kindly got in touch to tell us cloud storage gateway Nasuni's customers had an outage last week. Nasuni says you have to be a real service provider to have an outage.

CTERA's spokesperson said: "Last week, enterprise storage company Nasuni, suffered a multi-day outage. This resulted in customers with no access to their filers, and later as the company scrambled to triage the problem, performance degradation, and ultimately stalled businesses as Nasuni worked to recover."

Cloud storage gateway CTERA's marketing SVP Jeff Denworth says organisations can prepare themselves for outages and offers two initial tips:

  • Sync, don’t cache your data… so your office can survive the eventual cloud outage
  • Own your service, so you’re not subject to the scaling and operational issues of your SaaS provider who is supporting other customers (be in control of your own fate!)

Long story short; don't use Nasuni, says CTERA.

We asked Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez about this. He wryly observed: "There should be a saying about bad news, keeping your enemies close and the speed of light."

What happened? "Nasuni experienced a feature disruption involving global locking, which affected roughly 20 per cent of Nasuni’s customers and about 10 per cent of workloads. All other customers experienced no disruption."

The details? "For four hours on Wednesday, June 15, we experienced a performance degradation in our API servers. There was another feature disruption involving the global lock on Thursday, June 16 for about an hour and 45 minutes – in both cases, customers had intermittent access during that time to those storage volumes that use global file locking."

Rodriguez emphasises: "No data was lost or corrupted. This was the first outage in our global lock services in more than three years of it being in production and we are taking measures to prevent a similar feature disruption in the future by rolling out cross-regional locking and by helping customers configure their filers so that, in the case of a locking disruption, they will be able to read and write to all data in their local cache."

"Nasuni has served billions of global locks, and still strongly believes that cloud-based global file locking is the best architecture for locking files over many locations sharing many terabytes of data. Systems that rely on devices to act as a lock server are extremely difficult to scale globally and are vulnerable to disruption if the device fails, in which case the responsibility for fixing an outage lies with the customer’s IT organization. Nasuni, on the other hand, proactively monitors its service and takes full responsibility for fixing issues as they arise."

Real service providers

We should be aware, Rodiguez said, because we should "see through the fog of war … None of our competitors, be it CTERA, Avere or Panzura, can have outages because none of them offer anything like an integrated service. The only vendors that can suffer outages are real service providers. Panzura and Avere sell hardware that connects to other people's clouds. CTERA sells software and they let other people – MSPs or big companies – run it."

"Nasuni is the only company that has a SaaS-like enterprise file services offering. CTERA does not have file synchronisation across sites... It is impossible to do anything reliably at scale with files without a file services layer. The Nasuni model is similar to a SalesForce, a WorkDay or a Dropbox model and, yes, that makes us vulnerable to outages but it is also makes possible the extraordinary things we do for our clients."

Long story short: don't use CTERA, says Nasuni... ®

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