Nasuni sorts out large remote file SMB/NFS access pain

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Nasuni sorts out large remote file SMB/NFS access pain
Nasuni contrasts its high-performance edge caching-based remote file access with WAN optimization tools that make CAD assemblies replication of large files between sites take hours. We asked its CTO, Jerry Carter, some questions about this to find out more.
Blocks & Files: A Nasuni blog cites CAD assembly replication over WAN optimization tools taking hours. What file sizes are we actually talking about, and what specific WAN optimization tools (Riverbed, Silver Peak, etc.) are customers typically using?
Jerry Carter: CAD assemblies aren't single files. A Revit project with linked MEP and structural models, or a large SolidWorks top-down assembly, is a collection of hundreds to thousands of referenced parts, families, and linked models, and the totals run from a few hundred megabytes into multiple gigabytes depending on project complexity. Across our AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) customer base, it's not unusual to see tens to hundreds of terabytes of active project data and hundreds of in-flight projects at any one time.
As for the WAN-side stack, customers run the full spectrum: Riverbed Steelhead, HPE Aruba EdgeConnect (formerly Silver Peak), Cisco WAAS in older estates, and various SD-WAN platforms. None of them is the source of the pain. The pain is intrinsic to the protocols. SMB and NFS were designed for LAN-class latency, and every file open, attribute lookup, and lock acquisition is a separate round trip. No amount of TCP optimization or protocol acceleration can fully outrun physics when an application is round-tripping thousands of operations to open a single assembly.
Blocks & Files: What is the architectural difference between the traditional model (site-to-site replication over WAN optimization) and Nasuni's edge appliance + cloud sync model? Specifically, how does each handle file access, change propagation, and latency?
Jerry Carter: In the traditional model, file servers replicate site-to-site and users access them natively over SMB or NFS across the WAN. WAN optimization appliances sit inline and do their part: TCP optimization, deduplication, and protocol acceleration like read-ahead, write-behind, and CIFS/SMB pre-acknowledgment. The protocols were always the wall they kept running into. SMB and NFS are chatty and round-trip-dependent, designed for LAN latency, and no optimizer fully escapes that.
Nasuni takes the topology out of the equation. The authoritative copy of the file system, UniFS, lives in cloud object storage. Each site runs an edge appliance that serves files from local cache at LAN speed, and changes are chunked and uploaded to the cloud rather than replicated site-to-site. The WAN optimizer was treating a symptom. UniFS removes the cause.
Active Everywhere comes in for the workflows that need more than cache and sync. It's the access-and-movement layer on top of UniFS for the cases where multiple sites collaborate on the same data set simultaneously, where remote desktops need LAN-speed access to large files without a VPN, or where edge sites move data over constrained links. The transport is UDP-based and WAN-optimized, distribution between sites is peer-to-peer, global file locking keeps users in different offices from overwriting each other, and policy-based caching pre-stages what each location actually needs.
Active Everywhere 6.0 adds VPN-less hybrid work access with identity-provider sign-in through Entra ID or Okta, so governed file access follows the user instead of being tied to a VPN. The release is targeted for general availability in Q3 2026.
Blocks & Files: Do we have a published case study with quantified results specifically for large-scale CAD assembly workflows?
Jerry Carter: Yes. Two strong, publicly referenceable ones live on nasuni.com.
Ramboll, the global engineering, architecture, and consultancy firm, runs on Nasuni across 16,500 employees in 35 countries and 300 remote offices, with 3 PB of global file data stored, protected, and managed on the platform. Before Nasuni, latency plagued their CAD applications and moving data across borders was a persistent headache. Their IT Project Manager, Morten Madsen, has been public about what changed.
When their Mumbai data center went dark during the pandemic, IT stood up a Nasuni Edge Appliance as an Azure VM in roughly two hours and shifted local users straight to file shares running in the cloud. They went from multiple maintenance updates each week on the previous infrastructure to a single platform spanning all 300 offices, with 15-minute disaster recovery and a typical 90 percent reduction in local hardware footprint as branch sites cut over. Madsen's read on the collaboration side is that branch users have been unable to tell the difference between local NetApp and Nasuni edge appliances backed by the cloud, which is roughly the ideal outcome for an IT migration.
Perkins&Will, one of the world's premier architecture firms, has been on Nasuni since 2013, today running across 2,500 designers and 28 global design studios on nearly every continent. CIO Murali Selveraj has put numbers on it: 60 percent cost savings compared with continuing on traditional infrastructure as the firm's cloud footprint grew by 10X, and a 4X acceleration of post-M&A integration, from 12 months down to 3, when they fold in newly acquired studios.
The architectural reason is the single global namespace. They move designers and data between studios without replicating files, which means a single source of truth across every studio in the world. They've taken it further into AI and ML, running analytics across more than 500,000 drawings and photos of past projects so architects can search for similar prior work by visual characteristics rather than filename or metadata.
Both sit within a broader pattern. Nasuni today supports more than 1,300 enterprise customers globally across industries including AEC, energy, life sciences, manufacturing, and media, and the platform is the file data foundation behind some of the largest architecture, engineering, and construction firms in the United States.
On AEC workloads specifically, Nasuni is tuned for the design applications people actually run: AutoCAD, Revit, Civil 3D, BIM, ArcGIS, and SketchUp. The edge caches routinely sustain up to 98 percent cache-hit rates on design files, which is what makes large Revit projects and SolidWorks assemblies open at near-local speed from any office.

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