Panzura has released version 8.4 of its CloudFS core technology, claiming the latest update increases access security and lowers cloud storage costs.
CloudFS, billed by Panzura as being built on the world’s fastest global file system, has a global namespace and distributed file locking supported by a global metadata store. It is the underlying technology used by Panzura Data Services, which provide cloud file services, analytics, and governance, and also support the new Symphony feature for on-premises, private, public, and hybrid cloud object storage workloads managed through a single pane of glass.
Panzura CTO Sundar Kanthadai blogs that CloudFS v8.4 “introduces important enhancements for cloud and on-premises storage. CloudFS 8.4 makes it easier to get into the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and improve user command and control over the unstructured data.”
Kanthadai claims the software provides “finely tuned, granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). This allows for precise user permissions within the CloudFS WebUI, ensuring compliance with internal and external controls.” It integrates with Active Directory (Entra) with “tailored access for various roles and enables even more compliance options.“
Competitors CTERA and Nasuni have RBAC support and Panzura has now caught up with them in this regard.
CloudFS v8.4 supports more S3 tiers through S3 Intelligent Tiering and also Glacier Instant Retrieval:
- Frequent access for freshly uploaded data,
- Infrequent access for data with no accesses in 30 days,
- Archive Instant Access for data with no accesses within 90 days,
- Glacier Instant Retrieval with millisecond access, faster than Glacier Standard or Deep Archive with their retrieval times in minutes or hours
Kanthadai writes: “CloudFS caches frequently used data at the edge, enabling local-feeling performance and virtually eliminating the need to egress data from the cloud to support active file operations. As such, Glacier Instant Retrieval may be used with CloudFS to offer performant retrieval on the occasions it is required, while offering substantial overall storage savings” of up to 68 percent.
Panzura admins can now directly assign “objects to their desired storage class upon upload, eliminating the need for separate lifecycle policies and reducing application programming interface (API) calls.”
CloudFS already supports VMware and Hyper-V on-premises edge nodes and now adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v9.4) KVM support.
V8.4 has existing support for cloud mirroring with identical copies of data in two separate object stores, and “now accelerates synchronization of data changes made any time the primary object store was unavailable” up to 10x faster. Also “the synchronization itself serves to dramatically reduce egress charges.”
More speed improvements come from “file operations for extremely large files and folders [being] faster with this release, which improves file and folder renaming as well as changes to file and folder permissions, and some file write operations.”
