Panzura unveils CloudFS 8.5 Adapt

Panzura, a leading global file services player, has announced several key features with its 8.5 Adapt release of its CloudFS product, what they call an hybrid cloud file platform. Panzura has been recognized again in 2024 as a leader in the Coldago Research Map 2024 for Cloud File Storage. We invite our readers to check this report page.

We met last week the company in San Jose for a company and product update during The IT Press Tour and the team took advantage of this meeting to unveil this 8.5 major evolution targeting business continuity, performance and security.

The first main feature is Instant Node, a new capability to migrate a Panzura node from on-premises to cloud or vice-versa, refresh hardware or just reinstall and repair a failed node. In all these cases, the service is restarting very fast proving service to users in a very rapid way. To facilitate integration and control, the engineering team had exposed a REST API to ease the coupling with IT management solutions.

The second one is Regional Store to offer a more data propagation mechanism associated with a quality of service. Instead of having only one source of truth in the cloud with all edge Panzura instances connected to it wherever they run, the 8.5 release allows connection of these edge machines to multiple back-end object stores, in fac tup to 4 buckets. In that case, Panzura is not responsible of the data propagation across clouds, this task is made by clouds service themselves within same vendor entities or between various clouds. This design reduces drastically latency and we can reasonably think that until today when this configuration exists, users suffers from that deployment model. It is the case when data is not yet in the cache. 

Additionally, this release introduces some security things like the SSO support via OKTA service integration.

Also Azure Storage Tier has been added like the AWS one, already available, to address files migrated to a different class of storage within the cloud service provider environment. This capability contributes to a better control of TCO globally.