Panzura Improves Flexibility, Performance Of Multi-Cloud Hybrid Data Management

‘With CloudFS 8.5 Adapt’s Instant Node, you don't need any existing infrastructure. You can bring up a node anytime, anywhere you want. You can use it for HA (high availability). You can also use it for node additions. You can use it for migrations, including cloud to on-prem, cloud to cloud, on-prem to cloud,’ says Panzura CTO Sundar Kanthadai.

Cloud file system developer Panzura this week unveiled a significant upgrade to its CloudFS platform focused on business continuity, performance and security.

Panzura is a data management company focusing on the hybrid cloud use cases via two different platforms, said Sundar Kanthadai, chief technology officer for the San Francisco-based company.

The first is CloudFS, the company’s flagship hybrid cloud file services, along with associated products including Panzura Data Services Edge and ransomware detection. The second is a new portfolio of offerings focused on assessment, compliance, risk analysis, data mobility, and soon governance and audit. That portfolio, called Symphony, came from Panzura’s July acquisition of Moonwalk, Kanthadai told CRN.

The new release, Panzer CloudFS 8.5 Adapt, focuses on improving disaster recovery scenarios and providing flexibility to move data seamlessly across different clouds in a hybrid cloud environment, Kanthadai said.

“We have a high availability functionality which provides seamless failover scenarios,” he said. “In any kind of a high availability scenario, you have an idling node that is waiting to take over. We have brought in a new mechanism to do disaster recovery scenarios that will be cheaper in terms of infrastructure. It can bring up a CloudFS node anywhere you want. You can use it for data migration purposes. You can use it to add a new CloudFS node. You have all the flexibility of bringing up a quick CloudFS node at any place, any time, in a matter of minutes.”

Previously, for CloudFS node resilience, a business would need two nodes, one active and one passive, with the latter configured to be always ready to take over, Kanthadai said. However, he said, that requires dedicated infrastructure for that recovery node.

Panzura also traditionally offered global high availability where certain nodes are dedicated global, high-level, lean nodes which can take over for any active node, Kanthadai said. However, that also requires some nodes to sit idle, he said.

“With CloudFS 8.5 Adapt’s Instant Node, you don't need any existing infrastructure,” he said. “You can bring up a node anytime, anywhere you want. You can use it for HA (high availability). You can also use it for node additions. You can use it for migrations, including cloud to on-prem, cloud to cloud, on-prem to cloud.”

Glen Shok, Panzura’s vice president of product marketing, told CRN a major benefit of CloudFS 8.5 Adapt is that it eliminates the cost of having data center infrastructure sitting idle waiting for a disaster to happen.

“If you have a second system for local high availability, you're spending twice on the hardware,” Shok said. “We've gotten beat up in the past by our competition around the fact that we do have high availability, and in some cases they didn't, but we're substantially more expensive on the hardware and the initial cost because if you wanted high availability, you had to pay twice for hardware. With instant node, if you have a pool of resources available for virtual machine-type of failovers, instant node can come up in five minutes utilizing that pool of excess capacity you already have. You don't have to earmark hardware for HA.”

The difference between the time local HA and Instant Node is available is realistically between three and four minutes, Shok said.

“That is under the amount of time that any users will complain to IT,” he said. “If something's down, they'll go get a cup of coffee and hope it comes back up by the time the coffee's done.”

Panzura CloudFS 8.5 Adapt is currently available to channel partners. Panzura gets about 90 percent of its revenue via indirect channels, Shok said.

Because Panzura CloudFS is a global file system providing immutable storage, it works for a number of use cases, the first of which is cost savings, Shok said.

Because of that immutability combined with deduplication and HA capabilities, customers do not need traditional data backups, he said. In addition, CloudFS 8.5 includes regional store so that data on one cloud could be restored to another lower-cost cloud if needed, he said.

“Historically, we had one object store, and supported high availability with cloud mirroring so you could have a second mirror that was passive to let you do things like fail over to Wasabi, for instance, if you didn’t trust AWS S3,” he said. “CloudFS 8.5 has a concept called regional store. Initially, we're supporting four regions. If you want more than four, it's fine. We just want to ask you questions as to why because they are full copies of the back-end object store. … You're getting your data a lot faster, and our beta customers that have been using this are saving a lot of time. The admins no longer have to pre warm the cache. The performance is a lot faster, and because we the way that we handle our global locking capabilities, there won’t be any overwrites.”

Mike Wilson, chief technology officer at Datatility, an Ashburn, Va.-based provider of network, cloud, and data center co-location services primarily to the medical field and longtime Panzura channel partner, told CRN his company works to help customers connect to all the various cloud providers via Panzura.

“Panzura is the only gateway we utilize to connect customers because of the sensitive nature of the medical field and the fact that pretty much anybody you know wants you to sign a BA (business associate) agreement, be HIPAA certified, and take full responsibility for the data,” Wilson said. “Panzura is absolutely critical, because we can put it on-prem at the end user’s location behind their firewall and connect to their Active Directory environment. It does the encryption with a key that's owned by the customer on-prem. So by the time their data gets into our own cloud, we couldn't put it back together if we wanted to. It cannot be copied or compromised in our data centers.”

That kind of security is key for a business associate in the medical field, Wilson said.

“We work predominantly with integrators,” he said. “The integrators bring us in to deliver the solution. So we have to sign a business associate agreement with the integrator that says, from this point forward, we take responsibility, you can sue us if something bad happens.”

Last year’s UnitedHealth Group's security incident brought home the importance of resilience in the medical industry, Wilson said.

“Panzura gives customers and ourselves, because we’re signing these BA agreements that allows customers to sue us, the peace of mind to actually do business with these hospitals that are obviously huge targets,” he said. “And because of Panzura’s functionality and the way we deploy it, it's living on our equipment. It's not living inside of the customer's VMware environment. We actually have control over the equipment. Therefore, if a customer gets compromised by a crypto lock style attack, the customer only needs to get their domain controllers back up. Nothing ever happens to our stuff. We're often the only thing in the environment that survives.”