by Bill Klump | @TheKlumper | January 10th, 2012
It is unfortunate that “the cloud” is still heavily overhyped to the point where a good deal of IT activity is devoted to convincing business decision makers that cloud computing is actually not some ephemeral science fiction story, but a legitimate way to augment and improve in-house computing capabilities.
Cloud storage is a ‘hot’ new storage technology for good reason. Organizations of all sizes are desperately trying to find ways to reduce total storage costs, while facing 50% annual growth rates and increasing demand to store data long-term. As cloud storage becomes an integral part of IT storage strategies, customers expect a highly cost–effective, secure, and scalable solution that provides seamless access to their data. The fundamental challenge facing cloud storage is scalability. And that’s where our “Disruptor of the Day” comes in!
Introducing Panzura -
Panzura was founded in 2008 by a core team of engineers with a decade-long track record of developing successful enterprise infrastructure technology products. Their work has become the foundation behind secure wireless networks, web-scale content delivery, and the Internet backbone. Panaura’s technical team also includes top talent from Sun, NetApp, OnStor, Veritas and other pioneering storage companies.
The Panzura vision is deceptively simple to articulate – deliver high-performing, multi-site, collaborative file services at the network edge, allowing storage capacity to be centrally located, managed, and protected. In today’s distributed enterprise, Internet technology is used to bring people closer together. Think about how often you use tools like VoIP telephony, web meetings, chat, and telepresence. Yet this ubiquity of communication and ease of use does not extend to data storage. File servers remain geographically separated and unconnected islands and our persistent information remains compartmentalized, out of reach, expensive to store, and difficult to protect. Systems administrators want to centralize storage because it is easier to manage. Users simply want access to their data, whenever they like and wherever they are. There has never been an elegant technical solution that addressed end-users and administrators alike.
Until now. Panzura’s File System Controllers leverage high-performance, secure Internet technology to create an interconnected, unified multi-site 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 simply get the files they need.
The Panzura System vastly improves the way file-based services are deployed. I don’t mean to sound like a commercial here, but whether your goal is to unify file access across physical sites, centralize storage, or off-load file-based data to the cloud, Panzura is absolutely the first call I’d make.
If you’d like to learn more about our “Disruptor of the Day”, you can visit their website at www.panzura.com
