When the New York Times launched its first web presence, new CTO Andres Rodriguez faced a major challenge - how to scale web services from 10,000 internal users to millions of subscribers. Andres' IT team could have purchased racks of web servers and load balancers. But building out The Times' data center wouldn't withstand the massive number of hits to its site when a major story broke. Instead, Andres turned to one of the largest edge platforms, whose use of the internet to replicate and cache content globally provided scale a single enterprise couldn't match. His early use of what is now considered a cloud service was a huge success.

As The Times began digitizing more of its content and production workflows, Andres soon encountered his next big challenge - how to store, protect, and manage the files that were doubling in size and number every year. He could have purchased racks of physical NAS devices, backup solutions, and disaster recovery infrastructure. But this hardware-based model could no longer support the magnitude of file growth. A new file services approach uniting the performance and access of a physical storage solution with the scalability, stability, and global reach of existing edge platforms was needed. Andres' idea for "NAS Unified" -- NASUNI -- was born.