The Panzura Managed Migrations service is now generally available to help enterprises migrate data into the vendor's CloudFS file system.
Panzura Managed Migrations provides a dedicated project manager, migration architect and migration engineer to customers beginning a large migration into CloudFS and their chosen clouds.
These Panzura contractors handle most steps of the migration, including roadmaps, scheduling maintenance downtimes and other technical labor. Different levels of management are also available depending on the size of the customer's migration.
Panzura executives declined to specify price for the service, stating the overall cost would be "market competitive" depending on the level of service required and total data moved.
The new service eases a significant burden for enterprise customers and makes Panzura a more attractive option for customers migrating petabytes of data into the cloud, said Dave Raffo, a senior analyst at Evaluator Group.
The more data you have, the better the candidate you are for this.
Dave RaffoSenior Analyst, Evaluator Group
"This is their way of saying they'll take care of migration," Raffo said. "The more data you have, the better the candidate you are for this."
Other cloud file storage services similarly offer migration services at varying levels of support. Nasuni offers a managed service with migration assistance contractors, while Ctera offers a mostly self-service migration tool.
These cloud storage vendors are duplicating many services on-premises storage vendors have offered for years.
"Massive data migrations have always been a popular service offering," Raffo said.
Vendors providing migration services place themselves in direct competition with third-party migration products, such as Datadobi's DobiMigrate, Raffo added.
Migrating to new markets
Panzura's enterprise cloud file storage with its CloudFS product enables a single namespace for users to interact with unstructured file data stored in the cloud as if it was available locally. Previously, Panzura offered some guidance for new customers to migrate into the cloud, but the process was mostly self-service. The self-serve, cheaper option is still available.
Panzura claims CloudFS can replace on-premises storage arrays with a virtual or physical caching appliance for frequently accessed data while a majority of customer files are stored in the cloud. Panzura supports hybrid cloud storage arrangements with private clouds, including IBM Cloud Object Store, Wasabi and Cloudian or the three major hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Products.
Panzura Managed Migrations also includes other services, such as quarantining duplicate or unnecessary data and placing the entire project under the management of Panzura.
"We don't want to move over obsolete data," said James Seay, chief services officer at Panzura. "It positions us upfront to do somewhat of a refresh on the data, what's important to the customer and what's relevant to them."
The new service has been in testing since September and was recently used by an architecture firm to move 170 TB into the cloud, Seay said.
Tim McCarthy is a journalist living in the North Shore of Massachusetts. He covers cloud and data storage news.
