Panzura Freedom 7 Empowers Enterprise IT to Manage Growth of Unstructured Data

Panzura, Inc. announced the Freedom 7 family, which enables organizations to combine the economics of cloud storage with the performance of flash to solve the problems associated with explosive unstructured data growth.

“We initiated a cloud-first strategy and selected Panzura to consolidate our traditional storage environment, centralize and manage unstructured data in the cloud, and reduce our operating cost. As of today, there are 6000+ users on Panzura,” said Say Lim, SVP, enterprise architecture and applications, Fluor Corporation. “We are excited about the Freedom 7 advancements that will deliver even greater scale, control, and insight to our business while providing the foundation for our unstructured data management in the cloud across the company.“

Freedom 7 family delivers:

• Performance and scale – Delivers performance and scale to meet application and user demands in both physical and virtual environments

• Expanded data center workloads – Performance NFS expands coverage for engineering and design, simulation, imaging, and software development applications

• Any platform, any cloud – Software-defined storage enables customers to deploy on any platform – physical, virtual, or cloud – and use any cloud. Additionally, customers have a new physical option for large scale, data center deployments: the Freedom 5700.

• Automated, centralized management – Intuitive GUI and API enable administrators to automate tasks and always be in control

• Cloud data protection – Designed for the cloud to protect, encrypt, and recover data globally

Panzura Cloud File System (PCFS) underpins Freedom 7
Programmatically accessible through REST APIs, PCFS is a scale-out, distributed file system for object storage. PCFS provides high performance with flash in the data center, and integrates the cloud to provide economics, scalability, and durability. Along with centralized, easy-to-use management, PCFS offers intelligent file services such as a global namespace, distributed locking, global deduplication, and military grade encryption.

Panzura has been awarded 26 patents to date for this innovative technology.

According to a March 2017 Gartner, Inc.’s report, “By 2021, more than 80% of enterprise unstructured data will be stored in scale-out file system and object storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers, which is an increase from 30% today.” ⁽¹⁾

“Moving from 30% to 80% of unstructured data in object storage and cloud in just four years will require breakthrough technology like Panzura Freedom 7,” said Patrick Harr, CEO, Panzura. “Freedom 7 incorporates a scale-out distributed file system for object storage with intelligent services that are backed by 26 patents to enable the transformation to the cloud without compromising the speed of the data center.“

Explosive unstructured data growth
Unstructured data is growing fast, roughly doubling every two years in most organizations, and legacy storage solutions are unable to cope. Indeed, according to Gartner, Inc., “Infrastructure and operations leaders have identified ‘managing data growth to support business demands as the top storage concern for 2017.’“ ⁽²⁾

Traditional, on-premises storage systems are far too cumbersome and expensive to scale and manage at this exponential rate of growth. At the same time, business leaders are increasingly mandating that IT adopt a cloud-first approach for new initiatives, even though IT remains skeptical that the cloud will be able to provide the required level of performance.

The Freedom 7 hybrid cloud storage solution addresses these concerns, enabling enterprises to consolidate and simplify their storage infrastructure, gain business speed and agility, and reduce the overall cost of storage by up to 70%. It also serves as the foundation for a cloud-first approach to managing unstructured data.

Freedom 7 is shipping.

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⁽¹⁾ Gartner, 2017 Strategic Roadmap for Storage, Pushan Rinnen, John McArthur, Stanley Zaffos, Raj Bala, Dave Russell, Julia Palmer, Valdis Filks, Garth Landers, Santhosh Rao, Robert Rhame, Julian Tirsu and Shane Harris. March 8, 2017.
⁽²⁾ Gartner, Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2017, Dave Russell, Arun Chandrasekaran, Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, Alan Dayley, Pushan Rinnen and Garth Landers. May 12, 2017.