U.S. Attorneys Standardize on Panzura

Panzura, Inc. announced that the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA) has awarded a contract to standardize globally on Panzura for its next-generation Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) platform serving all United States Attorneys’ Office (USAO) locations nationwide.

The solution will consolidate storage from approximately 265 USAOs, across all U.S. judicial districts, to an internal storage cloud. The Panzura Global Cloud Storage System will replace some legacy distributed storage infrastructure with a centralized repository to improve data access, meet stringent security and performance standards and dramatically increase operational efficiency.

It provides globally-distributed organizations with a consolidated storage infrastructure that offers cross-site LAN access to all files, integrated file locking, global deduplication, military-grade encryption, continuous snapshots, fast replication and DR, advanced access management and massive scalability in capacity. In addition, Panzura meets federal compliance requirements for FIPS 140-2, FISMA Moderate and USGCB certifications.

The Case for STaaS
Government agencies and commercial organizations commonly store data on their own filers, incurring large costs associated with their purchase and maintenance and those for upgrades, facilities and personnel.

With electronic discovery pushing decades-old storage architectures and capacity to their limits, the adoption of cloud computing amongst all U.S. federal agencies is an ongoing initiative by the U.S. General Services Administration to streamline the creation of sustainable, cost-effective IT services for the federal government. Addressing increasing storage costs and sprawl is one goal of this initiative.

The use of Panzura by EOUSA exemplifies the push to move mission-critical applications and data to the cloud to avoid spiraling CapEx, manual IT intervention and data retrieval delays, while providing encryption features to support a public cloud option with all necessary security compliance.

265 Locations, One Solution
With approximately 265 geographically dispersed USAOs and two existing data centers, United States Attorney locations share common characteristics, yet each district also features unique business mandates and varied storage footprints. The amount of storage ranges from approximately 3TB for smaller offices and up to 17TB for larger offices. Panzura storage replaces a siloed, dispersed infrastructure with a seamless, fast and centralized storage platform that is interconnected by a global file system and reduces system-wide duplication of data.

With ubiquitous real-time access to all data globally, the Panzura solution allows EOUSA to leverage efficient cloud object storage to reduce CapEx significantly, while making users much more self-sufficient in finding and obtaining data whenever and wherever needed. Panzura’s Global Cloud Storage System leverages cloud storage at the back end and presents a seamless NAS-like interface at the front end, which, along with all standard NAS features and controls, makes data feel local regardless of location. Data is securely accessed on a need-to-see basis, and chargeback capability allows IT to allocate internal costs according to usage.

"Panzura is proud to play a central role in the efforts of EOUSA to centralize data access across all United States Attorneys Offices, reduce costs, and meet stringent security requirements," said Randy Chou, CEO of Panzura. "EOUSA is leading the way to tap into the benefits of the cloud for a globally-distributed organization while meeting compliance and SLA requirements. Panzura will fill a vital need for highly-secure access to the efficiencies of the cloud with a tightly-integrated NAS solution to meet these aggressive storage goals of EOUSA, all while reducing costs across the board."