Just two months after Panzura released v8.4 of its CloudFS core technology, it has pumped out v8.5, claiming it delivers instant recovery and “unparalleled resilience.”
CloudFS is the underlying global filesystem technology for Panzura Data Services, which offers cloud file services, analytics, and governance. It has a global namespace and metadata store plus distributed file locking and Cloud Mirroring. This is a high-availability (HA) capability providing redundancy and disaster recovery for file data. V8.5 features so-called Adapt technology providing Instant Node replacement or migration for business continuity and localized Regional Stores for optimized local access to objects and performance.
Panzura CTO Sundar Kanthadai stated: ”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.”
Instant Node attempts to strike a price and performance balance between traditional high-availability setups and “the cost-effectiveness of using readily available local hardware resources, like servers, workstations or virtual machines (VMs), to achieve a high level of resilience.” Panzura says dedicated HA infrastructure, needs redundant servers and storage arrays, which cost money to buy and maintain.
The Instant Node feature supports node-to-node restoration for automated hardware upgrades, planned migrations, infrastructure changes, and other IT initiatives. It also has a REST application programming interface (API) for integration with existing and external IT infrastructure and automation tools.
The Regional Store feature provides accelerated access to Panzura-stored data for outlying users and remote edge sites; “teams located a significant distance from the primary data store.” It provides faster access to data “not yet cached by CloudFS.” Admins can configure up to four object storage buckets across their preferred provider’s cloud regions to shorten access time latency and avoid building high-speed network links to distant data stores.
The Regional Store buckets are synchronized by the cloud provider, “ensuring data consistency across regions.” AWS has 36 cloud regions worldwide, 8 in the USA, and Azure has over 60 around the globe.
Panzura says This CloudFS v8.5 Adapt capability helps optimize data placement for “high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline support including large language model (LLM) training, real-time collaboration and co-authoring, and disaster recovery preparedness. Storage costs can be optimized by selecting the most appropriate storage class based on access and usage patterns.”
V8.5 also has extended Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) support with Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities integrated with OKTA as an identity provider. Storage Tier Support for Azure supports Azure storage class tiering. Such tiering is already available for Panzura on AWS.
