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Leo A Daly uses Nasuni for more than just backup and protection. The cloud file storage system has enabled the company to shrink its overall data center footprint by reducing locations to just a single appliance with a 2 TB local cache and storing a majority of its files on Microsoft Azure. Previously, the team maintained a local server with local storage and backup storage at all 30 Leo A Daly sites.

Held said his overall IT plan for the company, especially when signing up for Nasuni in 2016, was to reduce the potential issues such as network outages due to turbulent weather from relying on localized geolocations for file storage.

“This approach allows us to mitigate a lot of the risk you would have experienced before,” he said, noting other offices across the globe have gone offline due to winter storms and other dangerous weather.

At the time, his department needed to refresh its on-premises storage for a second time within five years due to the ever-escalating file sizes from design programs such as AutoCAD and Autodesk Revit. Additionally, appliance backups were processed manually using Microsoft Robocopy.

“We were growing much faster than we predicted,” Held said. “I was looking for a way out of that rat race.”

Held explored products from a few competing vendors but chose Nasuni due to his organization’s need for some on-premises storage caching appliances and lower cost.

“We were looking to reduce our footprint, reduce the data redundancy and increase the speed with which our studios received updated information,” he said.

But it was the data accessibility features that sold Held on Nasuni. They ensured data accessibility if other appliances on the network were offline and even in the case of a node outage, an issue that another vendor under consideration at the time couldn’t manage.

“To have one [node] go offline and that forces them all into inaccessible mode? Didn’t work for us,” he said.

Since Leo A Daly became a customer, Nasuni has worked to implement several of Held’s requests into the product. The vendor’s new Global File Acceleration feature, which expedites multi-site file synchronization, has helped significantly reduce the time it takes to generate a new file or folder on the network. New files could sometimes take up to a 30 to 45 minutes to appear, but now take a minute and a half on average, Held said.