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Panzura CloudFS capabilities focus on business continuity

Panzura's CloudFS hybrid cloud storage platform expands file access speeds and offers a new workload recovery capability without the need for high availability tooling.

Tim McCarthy
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Published: 05 Feb 2025

Panzura has updated its CloudFS data management platform to improve business capabilities and remote file availability.

The new capabilities could help Panzura keep pace with its market competitors, according to analysts.

The Panzura CloudFS 8.5 Adapt update, available today, includes the new features called Instant Node and Regional Store alongside a handful of other new features. These new features come a few months after the last update to the CloudFS platform, which provides access to file data on top of a cloud or data center object storage server.

Panzura is increasing the update cadence to both expand features and keep the company's name top of mind among software-defined storage (SDS) buyers, said Mitch Lewis, research analyst at The Futurum Group.

The vendor will likely need to keep up the pace of both updates and new offerings against competitors such as Nasuni and Ctera, both SDS competition, as well as other storage platforms such as Hammerspace, which specializes more in HPC and AI, he said.

"It's good to see this development," Lewis said. "They've hit the ground running again."

Cloud (five) nine

Instant Node enables customers to recreate nodes, the vendor's term for localized virtual environments in CloudFS, within a few minutes in their respective CloudFS environments without need for additional server hardware or resources.

The capability provides an alternative to enterprise IT relying upon dedicated high availability hardware or cloud services for IT needs like migrations, maintenance cycles or for uptime during a recovery, according to Panzura. IT teams can use the Instant Node API to connect the service with other automation tools.

In a classical definition, maintaining high availability requires customers to maintain server hardware in standby for on-premises recovery or allocate those resources in the cloud, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.

In either method, keeping those services available can create a significant cost, he said. The ability to quickly replicate a node without the need to maintain separate hardware or cloud tooling is a benefit for enterprise IT even if there's a time delay to handle routine tasks or issues which cause downtime.

"The challenge with high-availability is you're doubling the hardware footprint if you've got [dozens of] offices," Robinson said. "If there's some way to give you a level of resilience and continuity, that's going to be good enough for most organizations."

The ability to recreate nodes also gives CloudFS additional cyber-resiliency capability, said Jerome Wendt, CEO and principal analyst at DCIG.   

"The availability might resonate with clients now because of ransomware," Wendt said. 

Regional Store and more

The CloudFS platform's new Regional Store enables the creation of four local object stores which synch back to a central cloud storage provider's data center. The buckets are then synchronized by the cloud's own tools to the central data repository, which could be far away from distributed teams.

Regional Store is specifically designed to help eliminate access latency to files for users like media companies or engineering firms who often work with large file sizes, according to the vendor.

Other capabilities available now in the Panzura CloudFS 8.5 Adapt update include Role-Based Access Control for Single Sign-On support in Okta, enabling deeper integration between CloudFS and the Okta platform, and Storage Tier Support for Microsoft Azure.

The new support for different Microsoft Azure storage tiers enables Azure cloud storage customers to move infrequently accessed CloudFS data into colder tiers.

Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.

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