Panzura’s SaaSy global on-prem and public cloud file indexer

Cohesity has Helios, Rubrik it’s Polaris, Druva its DCP, and now Panzura has Vizion.ai, a SaaS-delivered file data management service.

File sync’ and sharer Panzura has developed its Vizion.ai product to catalog and index a customer’s entire global file estate, and then optimise its management. It builds up a metadata index of on-premises files on filers including NetApp, Dell EMC (inc Isilon and VNX), Hitach, Windows Server or any NFS or SMB compatible file shares.

It supports the AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM public clouds and incorporates a cloud-native, container-based deployment model with distributed caching and data reduction technology. Vizion.ai can be spun-up in any cloud, any region, and on-premises as a managed service.

A Panzura blog says it provides a unified view of all unstructured enterprise data, which implies that non-file-accessed object storage is not included unless it has a file gateway.

Once the index exists then Vizion.ai provides search, analysis, recovery and control, including analysis of hot, warm and cold data based on access patterns. Search and analysis are provided by Search and analytics functions are powered by what Panzura calls a hyper-scale, multi-cloud data engine; a Kubernetes- orchestrated platform with an application layer.

It has a scale-out distributed flash cache tier with global deduplication and tiering to object storage.

It integrates Elasticsearch and has machine learning for predictive analytics to help lower costs based on data access patterns and performance/cost analysis of different cloud storage locations.

Panzura points out there are more than 64 different cloud object storage/SLA pricing permutations between Google, AWS and Azure when accounting for multiple tiers with multiple regional pricing variations. Vizion.ai offers the ability to selecting the optimum tier and move data sets to it.

Vizion.ai screenshot.

The analytic tools include;

  • Storage Cost Optimizer applies machine learning to automatically determine the lowest cloud storage costs across multiple providers and Vizion.ai enables the movement of data between cloud storage tiers to optimize cost savings,
  • Storage Usage Profiler provides a heat map of what data’s hot, warm and cold based on access,
  • File Audit Report Filters provide administrative tools for policy enforcement to help data governance.

Searches can be run on filename, date, owner, groups and other file metadata items. An audit data search facility enables forensic discovery to track user activity across multiple files, folders and clouds. Content search is coming as are user-definable policies to create alerts.

There are plug-ins for Panzura and third-party data applications, and an API for third party developers to integrate Vizion.ai into their offerings. When integrated with Panzura’s Freedom NAS, users have the ability to restore or clone data sets from previous snapshots or backup sets to original or alternative locations.

Examples are cloning a database backup to a DevOps user or restoring a VMware backup set from a Los Angeles data centre to the eastern region of VMware Cloud in AWS.

Read a solution brief here and a white paper here. Interested customers can sign up for a free vizion.ai account here.

+Comment

Point-product file data managers are finding that their customers are heading towards the same place; one where files are stored in multiple on-premises and public cloud silos. Managing this disparate collection is difficult, especially with regard to regulatory compliance, and optimising file storage accessibility and costs.

Customers may settle on one suppliers’ global file management system and then move other file-level point product operations to the same supplier, jeopardising other suppliers’ business.

By providing its own global file management service Panzura has a defence against this and an opportunity to take business from competing point product suppliers lacking their own offering. B&F