Panzura Has Developed Through Years of Experience in File System & Network Performance Optimization

Panzura was founded in 2008 by a core team of engineers with a decade-long track record of developing successful enterprise infrastructure technology products. The technical team includes top talent from Sun, NetApp, Data Domain, Riverbed, Veritas and other pioneering IT companies. The Panzura vision is deceptively simple to articulate – deliver cloud-integrated local NAS capabilities to a globally-distributed enterprise, allowing storage capacity to be centrally located, managed, and protected.  As storage capacity needs explode and projects and workflows become shared across multiple sites, enterprises are searching for a storage solution that allows workers to share workloads at LAN-like speed while keeping storage and networking costs minimized. Those two needs have been mutually exclusive with traditional storage technologies. The Panzura Freedom NAS leverages high-performance, secure Internet technology to create an interconnected, unified global file system. With Panzura, persistent data can be centrally located where it is easy for IT to manage, yet remain fluid and easy to access, regardless of physical location. Storage islands disappear, capacity and data protection costs go down, system management is simplified, and users share workflows as needed as if they were local. 

The Interesting Past

Panzura had record growth in 2016, including adding over 100 new enterprise customers and expanding its channel and alliance presence with leading cloud providers AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft Azure. Companies and agencies such as Chevron and DOJ replaced their traditional NAS and archive environments with Panzura to move to hybrid cloud storage and reduce their costs by 70%. In addition, customers such as Milwaukee Tool and Fluor utilize our distributed file system to deliver multi-million dollar projects to market on time. Panzura added over 26 new petabytes of enterprise storage in 2016 and its hybrid cloud NAS, archive, and collaboration storage products are deployed in over 33 countries across multiple industries and governments. 

Panzura’s Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Panzura’s patented hybrid cloud storage software seamlessly combines the economics, unlimited capacity, and pay as you grow business model of cloud storage with the flexibility, performance, and features of enterprise storage. It enables data center performance with the economics, scalability, and durability of the cloud. The Panzura Cloud File System (PCFS) underpins Panzura Freedom.  PCFS is a scale-out, distributed file system purpose-built for the cloud and incorporates intelligence file services backed by 26 patents. 

Panzura offers three hybrid cloud storage solutions: 

Panzura Freedom Archive provides online access to data, allowing rapid retrieval whenever needed. Freedom Archive dramatically improves archiving access and cost while providing a platform that can scale up or down as needed, never oversubscribing, and eliminating the need for forward provisioning or capacity planning. 

Panzura Freedom NAS centralizes your file data in the cloud, while keeping active data cached close to the users. It behaves just like a local, Windows filer or NAS to users, but is backed by a central cloud data repository. It’s simpler, faster, and less expensive than deploying primary, backup, and archive storage at each site. Freedom NAS provides a Global Namespace across locations and comes in two options:

• The Primary/Secondary option enables two locations to have read/write capability locally and read capability at other location, similar to NetApp NAS systems at each location with SnapMirror replicating to the second location.
• The Multisite option takes that same concept to a larger number of offices. Every location has read/write capability locally and read capability at other locations.

Panzura Freedom Collaboration overlays a Distributed Cloud File System over all Freedom NAS locations with Distributed File Locking and Global Dedupe; each site is in the same single Distributed File System and has read/write capability locally in that file system.

Highlighted Reward   

Panzura Honored as Coolest Cloud Vendor by CRN 2017

CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Panzura to its 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors of 2017 list. This annual lineup recognizes the most innovative cloud technology suppliers in each of five categories: infrastructure, platforms and development, security, storage, and software. The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors are selected by the CRN editorial team for their creativity and innovation in product development, the quality of their services and partner programs, and their demonstrated ability to help customers benefit from the ease of use, flexibility, scalability, and budgetary savings that cloud computing offers. 

The Architect’s Note

“It’s now a cloud-first world and solution providers know that the days of expensive, traditional storage solutions from vendors like NetApp or EMC are numbered. Panzura Hybrid Cloud Storage solutions provide a strategic opportunity for solution providers to take advantage of this drive to the cloud while providing their customers with a solution that saves up to 70% when compared to a traditional storage model.” ,” - Patrick Harr, Panzura CEO 

Meet the Wit  

Patrick Harr, CEO: With more than two decades of industry experience, Harr joins the company after holding positions as vice president and general manager at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), vice president at VMWare as well as a go-to-market leader and CEO of multiple start-ups, including cloud storage pioneer Nirvanix which he founded, Preventsys which was acquired by McAfee and storage networking leader Sanera which was acquired by McDATA/Brocade. While at HPE, Harr scaled the Americas cloud business 19X leveraging key GTM partners and generated over $1.5B in revenue in five years. He has extensive startup and Fortune 500 vendor experience across cloud, storage, security and networking. Harr received his MBA from the University of Maryland and a BA from Tulane University in Political Economy and Russian. He has four kids and lives with his wife and family in Los Gatos, CA.

“Our revolutionary technology seamlessly combines the economics, capacity, and business model of cloud storage with the flexibility, performance and features of enterprise storage”