The Nasuni File Data Platform is a cloud-native suite of services offering user productivity, business continuity, data intelligence, cloud choice, and simplified global infrastructure. The platform and its add-on services replace traditional file infrastructure, including network attached storage (NAS), back-up, and DR, with a cloud-scale solution. By consolidating file data in easily expandable cloud object storage from Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and others, Nasuni aims to become a cloud-native…
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ownCloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
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ownCloud is a self-hosted open source file syncing and sharing option, from the Boston-based company of the same name.
Well suited if you have a lot of data that doesn't need to be stored and read right away. I think even if you don't have much data, you can still use it for it's intended purpose to great effect, but think of it as the more data you have, the even better it will work. I don't think it would be particularly useful if you already have a slick file restore system in place and you don't need to store your data elsewhere with redundancy.
I'd easily recommend ownCloud to small businesses or teams within organizations. I've not used ownCloud in large deployments, so I'd hesitate before suggesting it in a situation where more than 10 users need support. That said, ownCloud is easy to set up and multiple instances could be used to service a large user base.
The management console is extremely simple and easy to navigate, making common tasks easy to do.
Our storage appliance is configured to snapshot data several times an hour, making the risk of data loss very low.
Data restores are very intuitive, and take seconds to initiate regardless of whether it is one file or 300GB of data. We have successfully restored many Gigs of data in minutes.
Attention and dedication to making the product a world class product with continual product updates.
Ease of use from an administration standpoint, and a very Clear UI.
The price -- you can't beat free!
Mobile applications are great.
Integration with public S3 cloud providers like AWS S3 and Wasabi S3.
2FA authentication is supported and works great!
Marketplace Add-Ons: I love this! For example, I can install an add-on that natively opens raw images. I am a photographer as well, and being able to quickly view the CR2 Raw Files direct from the camera is fantastic! This was made possible by a marketplace add-in.
Embedded Media Players: Photos, Music, and Video files can be viewed and played right in the browser window.
Sync application to keep local files on a computer updated with the files on the server.
Access control and permissions -- shareable links!
Inability to easily collaboratively edit the same document by several people. Some advances have been made with Collabora (Libreoffice online) but it is still very sub-par compared to Office365 and desktop/online Office editing Sharepoint or OneDrive documents.
Apps for Calendar and Contacts are not part of the basic core, and although now quite supported they cannot still be easily deployed in common email clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird, separate CalDAV and CardDAV plugins need to be installed. Embedding an email solution and plugins for major email clients so they can work just by entering username and password would be good.
Risk of moving important folders/files to another location just by random drag-and-drop on Windows. Sometimes this breaks public links that cannot be restored anymore. Reverting such mistake by any of the users is impossible automatically.
When some user deletes some data in a shared folder it is put into recycle bin of the owner of the folder. The user who deleted cannot himself/herself revert such action as he/she does not see the recycle bin (trash) of the owner. Also, there is no log in the recycle bin who deleted that file or folder.
As I mentioned, the user interface is amazing and straight forward. It's very easy to learn how to configure and restore files. I would like a bit more reporting, especially in terms of live reporting and monitoring. The support is great when you have a question on how to do something, which helps with usability.
OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.
Again, it may have a little to do with the size and speed of your own environment, but we've been nothing but pleased with the speed of access of the files - even pulling old files from the cloud storage. Recovery of huge and many data files is a bit slow if you don't have the specs of the filer up to snuff.
Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.
Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.
The technical support and escalation path for Nasuni is much more reliable and efficient. No getting transferred to various teams. Often times, the person who answers your call is able to resolve your issue. If they cannot, they get the case assigned to the appropriate engineer right away. Time to close has always been very good.
The paid cloud services are expensive if you need a lot of data. You're giving your personal and business information to a data-hungry organization. Local NAS solutions are too slow. We run ownCloud on an older business PC and the performance is outstanding, even for remote access, due to local syncing.
Dramatically reduced time spent managing our storage platform. Quotas and reporting tools take all the guesswork out of data growth. Updates are easy to deploy. Time freed up can be used for more user-facing activities that we consider more valuable to the organization.
The overall stability of the platform has been very good. We have been running on the same hardware for the past four years without any performance issues.
