Hi Eriks,
I can speak to this from Laserfiche's perspective.
Nasuni appears to belong to a class of solutions that provide a transparent interface between object storage and traditional file/storage access protocols. Natsuni's product features page lists "Extensive Protocol Support - Nasuni supports access to files through standard SMB (CIFS), NFS, FTP/SFTP, and HTTPS file-sharing protocols."
Laserfiche’s support here extends to our software correctly using the standard SMB and NFS file/storage protocols via Windows. In this scenario, we would view Nasuni as a “Generic Storage Appliance” with its own claims of standards-based protocol support, no different from a Windows File Server, NetApp ONTAP volume, Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, etc. E.g., we support SMB 3.0 via Windows, they support SMB 3.0, and typically all is well.
Many of our customers use such storage appliances with their Laserfiche software and we support those systems. If storage/file-access related issues arise and initial investigation does not clearly show that something erroneous is happening on the Laserfiche software side, we would request (and expect) you/the customer to investigate the issue from the Nasuni-side (as we would for any Generic Storage Appliance).
Please keep in mind that both sides claiming standard protocol support is not a perfect guarantee that everything will always work flawlessly. This class of solutions often uses some impressively clever techniques to provide a transparent interface for standard protocols. It wouldn’t surprise us if there are some unhandled edge cases lurking around.
This is why a customer testing their specific configuration themselves is so important – if any of those potential edge cases come up in the course of normal operation with their Laserfiche system, you want to know about that up front (and hopefully address it with Nasuni support).
In short, we will support Laserfiche software that uses these 3rd party "file protocol interface to object storage backend" solutions for repository/Forms volumes and non-active audit log storage. However, if an issue arises due to incompatibility with that 3rd party solution's implementation of storage protocol support (or similar), we are under no contractual support obligation to make compatibility fixes (if even possible) in the Laserfiche software. Any such fixes would be on a voluntary, best-effort basis.
Based on our current knowledge of such storage solutions, we do not believe it generally prudent to use them for Laserfiche Full-Text Search (LFFTS) search catalogs, active Laserfiche Server (LFS) audit logs, or the Workflow Working Directory as these involve active files that can change on a second-by-second basis. However, if the solution has an option to provide a flash/SSD storage-based cache/edge server (like a Nasuni Edge Appliance), you may find that suitable for the aforementioned "active" Laserfiche files.
Ensure that you have a well-defined Laserfiche backup and recovery strategy that covers the specific procedures and nuances applicable to the storage solution. At minimum, ensure that:
- Your production Laserfiche system has all of its SQL databases configured to use the "Full" Recovery Model and that you're taking frequent transaction log backups (ideally at least every 5-15 minutes).
- You're taking snapshot-based server backups at least daily.
- You're taking backups of your repository volumes at least daily. The RPO for your Laserfiche system is generally determined by repository volume backup frequency. Nasuni's "Continuous File Versioning" feature sounds like it would be excellent in this regard.
- You're retaining all of the above backups for an absolute minimum of 7, and ideally a minimum of 14 days. 30 is preferred. Storage is cheap relative to data loss.
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Speaking in a personal capacity, I'm seeing these "file protocol interface to object storage backend" solutions coming up more and more frequently and I think it's an exciting and promising area. There are a whole bunch of different solutions (it seems I hear a new name every month) built around this core idea. There's no way we can reasonably test Laserfiche against all of them, so we target standards compatibility just like they do.
I hope our customers who choose to use Laserfiche with these innovative storage solutions report back about their experiences here on Answers, whether they're positive or negative.
Cheers,
Sam