Nasuni differentiates its high-performance edge caching remote file access from conventional WAN optimization tools, which cause hours-long delays in cross-site CAD assembly and large-file replication. We interviewed Nasuni CTO Jerry Carter to explore the technical advantages and practical use cases of its solution.
Blocks & Files: Nasuni’s blog states WAN optimization tools take hours to replicate CAD assemblies. What are the typical file sizes, and which WAN tools do customers commonly deploy?
Jerry Carter: CAD assemblies consist of hundreds to thousands of linked parts, families and models, rather than single files. Complex Revit and SolidWorks projects range from hundreds of MB to several GB. AEC clients routinely manage tens to hundreds of TB of active project data and hundreds of ongoing projects worldwide.
Customers use mainstream tools including Riverbed Steelhead, HPE Aruba EdgeConnect (formerly Silver Peak), legacy Cisco WAAS and various SD-WAN platforms. The core bottleneck lies in protocol limitations rather than these tools. SMB and NFS are built for low-latency LAN environments, requiring repeated round trips for file opening, attribute queries and lock acquisition. No TCP or protocol optimization can eliminate latency for thousands of iterative operations needed to load a single assembly.
Blocks & Files: What architectural differences separate traditional WAN-based site-to-site replication from Nasuni’s edge appliance plus cloud sync model, specifically in file access, change propagation and latency control?
Jerry Carter: Traditional architectures rely on site-to-site file server replication, with users accessing files via SMB/NFS over WAN links. WAN optimizers apply TCP optimization, deduplication and acceleration tactics like read-ahead and write-behind, yet cannot overcome the chatty, round-trip-dependent nature of LAN-native SMB/NFS protocols.
Nasuni eliminates topology restrictions. Its cloud-hosted UniFS file system stores authoritative data copies, while on-site edge appliances deliver LAN-speed file access via local cache. File changes are chunked and uploaded to the cloud instead of replicated between sites, resolving fundamental latency issues rather than merely mitigating symptoms.
The Active Everywhere layer complements cache and sync for complex collaborative scenarios, including multi-site parallel data editing, VPN-free remote large-file access, and data transmission over constrained links. It adopts UDP-based WAN-optimized transmission and peer-to-peer inter-site distribution, with global file locking preventing cross-user overwrites and policy-based caching preloading site-specific required data.
Upcoming Active Everywhere 6.0 (Q3 2026 general availability) supports VPN-less hybrid work access via Entra ID and Okta identity authentication, enabling user-centric governed file access to replace traditional VPN-bound connections.
Blocks & Files: Are there quantified case studies for large-scale CAD assembly workflows?
Jerry Carter: Two verified public case studies demonstrate tangible operational improvements.
Global engineering and architecture firm Ramboll serves 16,500 employees across 300 offices in 35 countries, managing 3 PB of global file data on Nasuni. Previously plagued by CAD latency and cross-border data transfer issues, the firm rapidly restored service during a Mumbai data center outage by deploying a Nasuni Edge Appliance on Azure VMs within two hours. It consolidated fragmented legacy infrastructure into a single unified platform, achieving 15-minute disaster recovery and a 90% reduction in on-premises hardware footprint. End users experience negligible performance differences between legacy NetApp storage and cloud-backed Nasuni edge caching.
Top architecture firm Perkins&Will has adopted Nasuni since 2013, supporting 2,500 designers across 28 global studios. The solution delivers 60% infrastructure cost savings amid 10X cloud footprint growth and accelerates post-M&A studio integration from 12 months to just 3 months. Powered by a unified global namespace, it enables cross-studio designer and data mobility without file replication, maintaining a single source of truth. The firm further leverages Nasuni for AI/ML analysis on over 500,000 historical project drawings to enable visual similarity search.
Nasuni currently serves over 1,300 global enterprise clients across AEC, energy, life sciences, manufacturing and media sectors, supporting leading US construction and architecture firms. Optimized for mainstream design software including AutoCAD, Revit, Civil 3D, BIM, ArcGIS and SketchUp, its edge cache achieves up to 98% hit rates, enabling near-local speed access for large Revit and SolidWorks projects across all remote sites.
Beijing Qianxing Jietong Technology Co., Ltd.
Sandy Yang/Global Strategy Director
WhatsApp / WeChat: +86 13426366826
Email: yangyd@qianxingdata.com
Website: www.qianxingdata.com/www.storagesserver.com
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