APi Group Chooses Nasuni For Enterprise-Wide File Storage Backed by Azure

Nasuni Corporation announced that APi Group, Inc. has implemented the company’s solution to store, protect, and access 120TB of file data.

APi Group is a multi-billion-dollar parent corporation to more than 40 independently managed life safety, energy, specialty construction and infrastructure companies. It needed a solution that could keep pace with the growing amount of unstructured data generated by its 5,000 employees.

APi Group deployed Nasuni backed by Azure object storage to replace legacy NAS filers, backup systems, and file access software with an hybrid cloud solution that better supports its many one and two-person project sites, regional branch offices, and large main offices across the US, Canada, and the UK.

Serving the file storage needs of more than 200 locations had been straining APi Group’s IT infrastructure as well as the network and server group’s IT staff at the company’s New Brighton, Minnesota HQs. Past incidents such as a file server failure would impact data access at the local site as well as project collaboration at other locations. Furthermore, restoring the data was costly and labor-intensive.

“We needed a robust DR solution, something that could not only do file replication, but could also facilitate the increased collaboration we were seeing between our companies and offices. Additionally, we needed to enable file locking between sites so users could work on the same files without conflict,” said Brian Erickson, IT implementation and acquisitions manager, APi Group.

Nasuni Professional Services helped design a solution based on Nasuni enterprise file services and Azure object storage that is enabling APi Group to centrally manage and reliably backup 300 volumes distributed across all locations.

The final design takes advantage of Nasuni’s UniFS global file system, which stores all files and metadata in the cloud, and uses Nasuni edge appliances to cache the most frequently accessed files locally for secure access.

The design called for multiple Nasuni edge appliances to be deployed in the company’s main datacenter, enabling other sites to automatically fail over should their local edge appliances experience an issue.

The benefits were immediate. Support requests related to files plummeted, freeing up IT resources for other projects. Erickson, himself, used to spend many evenings babysitting the previous replication system because it would often fail. With Nasuni, he and other members of the IT team can centrally manage the global file system and edge appliances in all locations and provide faster support.

“Previously, we were overwhelming the replication system with the size of our file shares and the sheer number of locations we served,” Erickson said. “But Nasuni is much more scalable, with all edge appliances centrally managed. Even if something happens with one, each site remains independent. Nasuni is resilient – one site going down doesn’t affect any other site’s ability to access files. It’s been a game-changer.“

Nasuni is also an enabler of APi Group’s growth through acquisition. New offices can be on-boarded now that the acquired company’s existing file shares can be migrated into the Nasuni file system. Since APi Group has deployed Nasuni using virtual edge appliances in each office, IT can bring new locations online without a physical visit.

“I push the Nasuni edge appliance to the VM server, quietly do the data migration behind the scenes, and, when we do the cutover, employees arrive the next day, reboot and they have full access to their files,” Erickson said. “The ‘gold copy’ of the files are in the cloud, but users don’t notice any difference. It might take two ticks instead of half a tick to open the file the first time, but after that, the file is cached locally and is as fast as or faster than before the cutover.“

Because Nasuni only caches the most recently used files, physical disk size requirements for each location have dropped, freeing up funds that can be invested in higher performance disk drives and other IT needs.

“It’s like stuffing 20 pounds of potatoes into a 5-pound bag,” Erickson said. “Because we don’t have to buy as many large capacity drives as we did before, we are able to upgrade to fewer, lower capacity but higher rpm or even SSD drives. We saved money, and employees are seeing a significant performance bump.“

“Traditional NAS, backup, DR, and mobile file access products can no longer meet the needs of the many enterprises who are experiencing explosive file growth,” said Andres Rodriguez, Nasuni CEO. “We’re delighted that APi Group is realizing the many employee productivity, BC, and cost-saving benefits of cloud storage with Nasuni enterprise file services and Azure.“