Cloud data management provider Panzura is making it easier for its partners to better support customers in times of crisis.
On the recently held IT Press Tour across Silicon Valley, it took the wraps off the latest release of its Panzura CloudFS hybrid cloud file platform. Described as a “major upgrade” from version 8.4, CloudFS 8.5 Adapt really does seem like a major improvement in functionality, despite that small incremental step up.
It introduces features that clearly improve business continuity, performance, and security across the data ecosystem.
The Instant Node feature minimises or eliminates downtime, and Regional Store optimises local access and performance.
CloudFS 8.5 Adapt, says the supplier, also prepares partners and customers for a coming wave of artificial intelligence workloads, data fabrics, and composable tooling, by enabling flexible and adaptable unstructured file services.
“Building data resilience, command and control, and immediate data delivery into IT infrastructure is crucial for these architectures,” it says.
The Instant Node feature delivers persistent business operations and business continuity. In response to an attack or outage, for instance, it provides the ability to deploy, migrate, restore, or rebuild any node with “unprecedented speed and ease”.
Sundar Kanthadai, chief technology officer of Panzura, told the IT Press Tour: “Leveraging the power of modern storage technologies, Instant Node allows IT teams to replace failed nodes or move an on-premises node into the cloud and get back up-and-running in just a few minutes.”
Instant Node can also provide an alternative to dedicated high-availability (HA) infrastructure, like redundant servers and storage arrays, that require significant upfront investment and ongoing maintenance, but often sit idle waiting for a failure to occur.
“With Instant Node our clients get enterprise-class business continuity and infrastructure redundancy without the enterprise price tag. It also makes IT operations more time and resource efficient, while strengthening the accuracy and reliability of the recovery process,” said Bradley Horst, vice president, CIO advisory services, at Symetri, a Panzura partner.
When geographically dispersed teams access files that need to be fetched from an object store, latency can cause delays for teams located a significant distance from the primary data store. For data not yet cached by CloudFS, shortening the distance between users and the data they need obviously accelerates performance.
With the new Regional Store feature in CloudFS 8.5 Adapt, organisations can create additional object stores for localised access to data managed by the platform. Teams can configure up to four object storage buckets across their preferred provider’s cloud regions. Negating the impacts of latency, localised internet speeds, and expensive high-bandwidth connections, it also brings the data closer to users, “optimises IT operations”, and reduces cloud egress, Panzura says.
“CloudFS 8.5 Adapt empowers our customers to move at the speed of business. For IT teams, it’s a game changer. Bringing the cloud closer to people and processes significantly enhances operational performance for outlying teams, slashes data transfer fees, and reduces total cost of ownership. That translates into fewer support tickets and more focus on strategic initiatives,” added Panzura’s Kanthadai.
Panzura says 90% of its deployment deals go through its rapidly growing channel.
