Real Estate Essex Property Prefers Panzura File Locking for Cross-Office Collaboration

Panzura, Inc., in storage infrastructure for the cloud era, announced that West Coast real estate investment trust, Essex Property Trust, Inc., has seen cross-site collaboration benefits and storage savings with its file system with patented file locking.

Essex sought the need for file locking technology after having implemented a system from Nasuni Corp. that did not provide this benefit, and created more work for users – duplicate files constantly needed to be merged.

Essex replaced NetApp, Inc.‘s file system and backup solution with Amazon Cloud Storage.

Essex realized speedy results from switching
to Panzura from its previous vendor, including:

• File locking notifies users when others are in a document, preventing changes being made until the ‘lock’ is granted;
• Offices no longer have ‘islands of data’ – team members in each site running Panzura see one set of data stored in one central cloud storage system;
• Users no longer have to physically merge data and files at the end of each day;
• Changes to files are available to team members in different offices in real-time; and,
• Files are backed up in real-time throughout the day as opposed to once per day.
  

“We tried many different products and people would initially tell us that they had a file locking system in place, but as we got deeper into the meetings and tried out the technology, it just wasn’t a file locking solution like Panzura,” said Sam Ghnaim, director of IT, Essex. “Users are now getting local speed when opening files. Plus, we saw immediate benefits from a DR and backup perspective.“

After success with the Panzura file system across Essex’s offices, the company expanded its Panzura deployment when it made its acquisition of BRE Properties, Inc., a large West Coast apartment company. Panzura was installed in the BRE data centers where it was able to see and share files between two different, complex company networks. Essex and BRE employees were able to collaborate on files from day one.

“In the fast world of real estate, striking a deal can often come down to a matter ofs. Wasting time downloading the documents agents need to finalize these transactions is simply not an option – technology needs to work instantly,” said Randy Chou, co-founder and CEO, Panzura. “Knowing that Panzura global file locking technology is part of the toolkit that helps Essex Property Trust be successful every day makes us extremely proud, and we look forward to our continued partnership with this top real estate investment team.“