Start-Up’s Profile: Panzura

Company:
Panzura

Headquarters:
San Jose, CA

Founded in:
2008

Financial funding:
$6 million from Matrix Partners in September 2008

Revenues:
In the six figures

Main executives:

• Randy Chou, co-founder and CEO, has over 15 years of experience in the security, networking and application acceleration industry. He was formerly part of the software founding team of Aruba Networks where he managed the company’s software security team.
• John Taylor, co-founder and CTO, spans 15 years in software development and management in the computer and networking security industry, particularly in the areas of ATM, web acceleration, and Wi-Fi. He was previously a member of Aruba’s software founding team where he served as director of engineering. He also worked as software architect and engineer at Alteon Web Systems and Fore Systems as a software engineer before the company began trading publicly in 1994.

Advisory team:

• Andy Watson, former CTO at NetApp
• Peter Danzig, former VP of technology at Akamai

Number of employees:
20, most of them from the founding teams of Alteon Websystems and Aruba

Technology:
How is it possible to use cloud storage as a local tier one storage? With Panzura’s Application Network Storage (ANS) architecture, application logic and storage technology are combined in an appliance named Application Cloud Controller (ACC). The approach is application-centric, rather than network-centric, focusing on application and data usage by predicting the user pattern with the company’s own patent-pending de-dupe technology.

For example, if a user in San Francisco uploads a 2 GB Windows 7 .iso
file and then another user in the enterprise uploads the same file from
Tokyo, no data would be sent to the back-end storage device even if the
device in Tokyo has never ‘seen’ the file before. If there were
differences between the files, then only the differences would be
uploaded to the final storage device where the authoritative copy lies.

Furthermore the controller used SSD as a cache with automated application storage tiering, and is integrated with enterprise authentication solutions such as Active Directory and a secure onboard TPM, FIPS 140-2 validated for security .

ANS can work with the existing storage infrastructure (SAN or NAS) through iSCSI, NFS, or CIFS interfaces as well as with public or private cloud solutions. It provides out-of-the-box support for Microsoft SharePoint, SQL Server, file sharing (via NFS/CIFS), and backup and DR.

                                Panzura Application Cloud Controller
                                                 for
SharePoint

Iron Mountain is a Panzura’s cloud storage partner for backup and archival services.
 
Price:
Starting at $25,000

Roadmap:
In the future, applications for Exchange and other Microsoft applications

Distributors and OEMs:
OEM agreement since March 2010 with an unknown publicly traded networking company; currently working with VARs and sales outsourcing firms.
 
Number of customers:
A handful of Fortune 50 companies in energy, finance, technology and healthcare, the focus being on large enterprises. One of them is an energy company to upload petabytes of data into the cloud at close to 1GB/s for backup and DR purposes. "The controller is also currently being used at a large public technology company with offices in the US and the UK where users were experiencing wait times of up to 50 seconds for the SharePoint home page to load", according to Panzura." Without changing anything in the infrastructure, the ACC improved the performance by 20 times."

Applications:
Storage, SharePoint, file sharing, cloud and CDN storage, backup, disaster recovery
 
Market:
Large enterprise using SharePoint or looking to share data across multiple locations while decreasing TCO per gigabyte

Competitors:
StorSimple, Cirtas Systems, Nasuni although most of them don’t seem to focus on the high-end of the market