Panzura CloudFS 8.5 Adapt Makes Business Unbreakable with Hybrid Cloud File Data Continuity and Performance for Enterprise

Summary:

• Panzura has announced the availability of CloudFS 8.5 Adapt, a major upgrade to the CloudFS hybrid cloud file platform. This release focuses on business continuity, performance, and security in a world of rising business disruption and change. It includes a set of features to help Panzura customers navigate risk and emerge stronger.
• Panzura CloudFS 8.5 Adapt enhances business continuity with Instant Node. This new feature allows for rapid node replacement or migration, minimizing downtime from failures or disruptions. Instant Node also streamlines IT operations and provides an alternative to expensive HA infrastructure, improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• Regional Store in CloudFS 8.5 Adapt optimizes performance and reduces costs for geographically dispersed teams. Creating localized object stores, Regional Store minimizes latency and improves access speeds for users located far from the primary data store for better productivity and optimized storage costs.

Panzura LLC, has announced availability for the latest release of the Panzura CloudFS hybrid cloud file platform. A major upgrade, CloudFS 8.5 Adapt introduces features that improve business continuity, performance, and security.

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Amid unprecedented global technological disruption, geopolitical upheaval, and cybercrime, CloudFS 8.5 Adapt provides a slate of new and innovative hybrid cloud file data capabilities like Instant Node to minimize or eliminate downtime and Regional Store for optimized local access and performance.

According to PwC, 96% of organizations have experienced disruption in the last 2 years with 76% saying their most serious incident had a medium-to-high impact on operations. Resilience is considered a core competitive advantage and priority by 89% of business leaders, and they want strategies underpinned by technology.

“Today’s enterprise must anticipate and respond to a dynamic state of ‘permacrisis’ where unpredictability is the new normal. With CloudFS 8.5 Adapt, Panzura is taking another leap forward in unstructured data management, enabling their customers to stay ahead of the curve and come out stronger,” said Robert Kramer, VP and principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy.

CloudFS 8.5 Adapt prepares the way for a coming wave of AI 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. This imperative also aligns with the diverse data orchestration and assessment capabilities of the Panzura Symphony data services platform.

Instant Node for New Era of BC
CloudFS 8.5 Adapt introduces a new Instant Node capability for business continuity. Technologists face mounting pressure to maintain uninterrupted operations and file data access. Disruptive events like natural disasters, cyberattacks, power outages, or hardware failures can lead to crippling downtime, financial losses, and untold reputational damage.

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The Panzura CloudFS platform provides local-feeling file services that allow centralized cloud storage to behave as if it’s a high-performance data center. Its nodes – localized virtual environments – enable performant file operations by caching active files. Real-time awareness of metadata across the entire system, irrespective of the number of locations or distance between them, ensures a collision-free, NAS-like experience for multisite organizations.

“The Instant Node feature in CloudFS 8.5 Adapt delivers persistent business operations and continuity. It provides the ability to deploy, migrate, restore, or rebuild any node with unprecedented speed and ease,” said Sundar Kanthadai, CTO, Panzura.

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 backup-and-running in just a few minutes. This is particularly beneficial for organizations migrating away from VMware, as it streamlines and derisks the migration process, and facilitates a seamless transition to a cloud-based file services architecture.

Instant Node also provides an alternative to dedicated 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. Instead, the Instant Node feature strikes a price and performance balance between traditional HA solutions and the cost-effectiveness of using readily available local hardware resources, like servers, workstations or VMs, to achieve a high level of resilience.

“With Instant Node in CloudFS 8.5 Adapt, our clients get enterprise 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 C. Horst, VP, CIO Advisory Services, Symetri.

Beyond DR, the Instant Node feature also enables node-to-node restoration for automated hardware upgrades, planned migrations, infrastructure changes, and other crucial IT initiatives. This flexibility helps technologists to upgrade and modernize their hybrid cloud and on-premises architectures without disrupting operations.

Extending this operational paradigm, Instant Node offers a REST API for integration with existing and external IT infrastructure and automation tools. Automated recovery workflows and integration with 3rd-party orchestration solutions means teams can streamline recovery processes and curtail time and resource investments.

Regional Store for Optimized Performance and Costs
When geographically dispersed teams access files that need to be fetched from an object store, latency can cause delays for outliers – 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 accelerates performance.

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With the new Regional Store feature in CloudFS 8.5 Adapt, organizations can create additional object stores for localized access to data managed by the platform. Technologists can configure up to 4 object storage buckets across their preferred provider’s cloud regions. Negating the impacts of latency, localized internet speeds, and expensive high-bandwidth connections, it also brings the data closer to users, optimizes IT operations, and reduces cloud egress.

These buckets are synchronized by the cloud provider, ensuring data consistency across regions. AWS has 36 launched cloud regions worldwide, including eight across the US alone, and Azure provides over 60 globally. End users within replicated regions access uncached file data regionally instead of retrieving it from a distant primary object store location.

By eliminating slow response times, fragmented workflows, and long delays for those outliers – especially for larger files – the Regional Store feature can save potentially hours of unproductive delays. This reduces project bottlenecks and errors, decisions can be made faster, and it frees up time to innovate.

“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 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,” said Kanthadai.

This CloudFS 8.5 Adapt capability also helps refine data placement for specific scenarios such as HPC, AI pipeline support including large language model (LLM) training, real-time collaboration and co-authoring, and DR preparedness. Storage costs can be optimized by selecting the most appropriate storage class based on access and usage patterns.

While Regional Store can serve a HA infrastructure role, its primary purpose is for local access and performance. The Panzura CloudFS platform offers Cloud Mirroring, a HA feature that provides redundancy and DR for file data.

Additional Features in CloudFS 8.5 Adapt
CloudFS 8.5 Adapt also includes several enhancements that further strengthen security and simplify operations.

Notably, it extends Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) support with advanced Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities integrated with OKTA as an identity provider. This strengthens security by centralizing identity management and reducing the risk of unauthorized access, simplifying user access through advanced SSO functionalities.

Storage Tier Support for Microsoft Azure offers flexibility and cost control by enabling the tiering of Azure storage classes. This allows technologists to align their storage strategy with specific performance and cost requirements, optimizing for cost efficiency and ensuring targeted data placement. This functionality, previously available for AWS in the preceding release, is now extended to Azure.